The American Dream
The American Dream is the ideological bedrock of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the set of promises about success, opportunity, and personal worth that Willy Loman has internalized and that the play relentlessly interrogates. It is not merely a background assumption but the active, destructive force that shapes every character's hopes, failures, and final reckoning. Miller's play, as Christopher Bigsby notes in his introduction, is "an exploration of the betrayal of those values and the cost of this in human terms." Willy Loman's American dream is "drained of transcendence" — a faith in the supremacy of the material over the spiritual, a conviction that being "well liked" and projecting confidence will inevitably yield the rewards of a transformed tomorrow.
The Dream as a National and Personal Myth
The Depression of the 1930s, Bigsby explains, "seemed to break the promises America had made to its citizens," yet the myth of the American dream proved resilient. In an immigrant society that has "chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice." When today fails, "tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing." This is precisely Willy's predicament: he is a true believer who cannot afford to stop believing. The play is not set during the Depression but bears its mark, and Willy's spirit reaches back to the expansive 1920s, "when it all seemed to be coasting, expanding opportunity everywhere, the dream in full bloom." Miller's critique, Bigsby insists, is not an attack on the American dream of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but on "the dream as interpreted and pursued by those for whom ambition replaces human need, and for whom the trinkets of what Miller called the 'new American Empire in the making' were taken as tokens of true value."
The Dream's Corrosive Effect on Willy Loman
Willy Loman has so completely internalized the values of his society that he judges himself by standards rooted in social myths rather than human necessities. He believes that meaning lies less in himself and his relationships than in the false promises of a society no longer structured around genuine human needs. His vulnerability comes from being a true believer. As Miller himself said, Willy "cannot bear reality, and since he can't do much to change it, he keeps changing his ideas of it." He is "a bleeding mass of contradictions," oscillating wildly between hope and disappointment. At one moment Biff is a lazy bum, at the next his redemption is that he is never lazy. A car and a refrigerator are by turns reliable and junk. He is, in his own eyes, a successful salesman and a failure. This oscillation brings him close to breakdown. The dream demands that he be a success, and when reality fails to match the claim, he adjusts his memories — or "daydreams," as Miller calls them — to serve present needs. His brother Ben is less a substantial fact than an embodiment of that ruthless drive and achievement which Willy lacks and half believes he should want.
The Dream's Betrayal of Human Values
Miller's play exposes the gap between the dream's promise and the human cost of pursuing it. Willy's real creative energy, as Charley observes at the funeral, went into work on his house: "He was a happy man with a batch of cement." But that is not something he can sell. The irony is that he, a salesman, has bought the pitch made to him by his society. He believes that advertisements tell the truth and is baffled when reality fails to match their claims. He believes the promises that America made to itself — that in this greatest country on earth success is an inevitability. Yet the play shows that the dream has become a mechanism of betrayal. Willy's flaw is not merely personal; it is that he has so completely internalized the values of his society that he is blind to the love offered by Linda, Charley, and Biff himself. As Miller explained, "built into him is — distrust, even contempt, for relationships based only on money." The dream has drained his life of the very things that might have given it meaning.
The Dream's Enduring Power and the Play's Global Resonance
Despite its devastating critique, the play does not simply dismiss the American dream. As Bigsby notes, when a woman called Death of a Salesman a "time bomb under American capitalism," Miller's response was to hope that it was, "or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last." The play, however, goes beyond such particularities. Its global success over nearly fifty years shows that if Willy's is an American dream, "it is also a dream shared by all those who are aware of the gap between what they might have been and what they are, who need to believe that their children will reach out for a prize that eluded them, and who feel that the demands of reality are too peremptory and relentless to be sustained without hope of a transformed tomorrow." The dream's power lies precisely in its refusal to be denied. As Charley says, "a salesman is got to dream. It comes with the territory." Willy Loman's tragedy is that he can neither fulfill the dream nor abandon it, and in that impossible contradiction, Miller locates both the pathos and the enduring significance of his play.
