Death of a Salesman (Penguin Plays)
by Arthur Miller
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Book Reviews of Death of a Salesman (Penguin Plays)
Book Review: Tragic Life of Willy Lowman
Summary: 4 Stars
Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller, describes the traditional highs and lows of the "American Dream". The way Miller has portrayed the different characters really shows the tragic reality of what Americans must cope with in their lives. In this playwright the audience is introduced to four main characters. Willy is the father and is pretty much losing his mind and is holding on to things that should've been let go of. Linda, his wife, is caring and completely adores him. Together they have two sons the elder is Biff, and Happy the younger one. Miller shows how dreams will not always turn out the way you imagined them to be.
Millers' point in this play is showing the way Americans want that dream of having the wife stay at home and take care of the house and the husband make enough for the two of them and they live happily ever after. In reality though it really never turns out that way. He depicts this family, the Lowman family, and how they struggle to survive. In this struggle Linda is found alone in her family. Seeing how Willy is going crazy and Biff and Happy only come home just to go away once more. As we are introduced to Act I you can see the drama in their family and how it only gets worse. The family that we perceive as perfect becomes helpless and sad. It then comes to the point that suicides an option for Willy just so that Biff can make it in the business world.
A life lesson that I have learned through this is that the American Dream isn't half as much as everyone makes it to be. There are so many things that are wrong about the "dream" that many people overlook. People should use the gifts they're given and not settle for something less than it. By striving to accomplish something that you just aren't good at makes it tough to have success at that job.
Therefore by exercising the talent we are given success is a lot more likely. Miller describes over and over again the idea of Willy wanting to be well like and even though that is a good thing, it can sometimes bite you back.
This saddening playwright is extremely well written and has a good storyline. The way he describes the lives of his characters and the way they lived is realistic and true to the lives of people today. The way that we can relate to the characters makes the play even more interesting. I definitely recommend this playwright because of its dramatic appeal and anyone who reads it will be able to relate somehow to one of the characters described.
Book Review: Realistic and Timeless
Summary: 4 Stars
After recently finishing The Crucible and now having read Death of a Salesman, I am in awe of Miller's talents as a playwright. In both works, he draws factual evidence from history to support the reality of his own experiences in creating what can only be called a masterpiece. Miller, through Death of a Salesman, affected the national psyche of his time. He based the play's central father-son relationship on that of he and his uncle and fashioned a summary of idealistic American notions of success and individuality. The use of prose and time-suited characters give his works a sense of realism that ultimately brings them to life for the reader.Miller employs various devices within the play. The most obvious are perhaps flashback and stream-of-consciousness dialogue, which the reader sees through Willy. These elements can make it difficult to distinguish Willy's reality from his imagination by the text alone, but both add to the reader's understanding of Willy's past and the gradual decline of his mental stability. Miller also employs multiple instances of foreshadowing, including his choice of title for this play. If the reader pays close attention to detail, the play's conclusion can be predicted long before the last few pages are read. One major theme is Willy's interpretation of the American Dream - that a "well-liked" and "personally attractive" businessman will indubitably and deservedly acquire material comforts, as opposed to becoming successful through one's on skill and hard work. This outlook drives his urge to "die well," another of the play's primary themes.
I must say that Death of a Salesman contains one of the best looks at human life. This play illustrates the death of the American Dream. While literally portraying a man fighting to maintain mental stability, it symbolically shows how Americans have turned the pursuit of happiness into the pursuit of money. For me, this novel spoke volumes. It emphasizes the human obsession to "get ahead" in life, only to wind up farther behind - ultimately losing the battle of life. As an adolescent, the strained father-son relationship of Willy and Biff forced me to examine whether or not I live up to the expectations of my own parents and question the traditional cliché. Do parents indeed know best? Overall, the novel is a beautifully realistic portrait of a family not unlike those of today. Death of a Salesman contradicts the erroneous "perfect family" model, solidifying it as a timeless classic.
Book Review: Death of the "American Dream"
Summary: 4 Stars
This book/play was a good read, with a lot of lessons to pull from it. Your situation in life defines what lessons you will most likely pull, but all in all, most everyone can gain something. It was close to modern times, with a lot of insights into modern problems.When Arthur Miller wrote this, he was trying to give a view into the business world. He was trying to show America as whole just how cruel the business world had gotten, how it would chew you up and spit you out when it was through with you, and how things had gotten very cold. This was shown in the scene with Willy Lowman getting fired. One thing he screams is," You can't eat an orange and throw the peel away! A man is not a piece of fruit!". This is so true, but it is also how the business world treats people.
Miller also shed some light on how a man had more duties to his family than just to put bread on the table and a roof over their heads, how sometimes they needed a husband and a dad more than anything. After all, Willy worked his whole life to provide his sons with clothes and food and things, but in the end, what they could really have used was a dad at home more often to teach them morals and work ethic. Biff and Happy had trouble finding themselves in life because from the time they were young, Willy had worked very hard to give them everything, they hadn't had to go out and get it themselves. All Willy ever taught them was to be liked, and that that was enough to get you through. This backfired on the two boys when they hit the real world and found out it wasn't enough just to be liked; you had to have more.
Personally, I learned that living your whole life on what others think of you can only lead you to feeling empty. Near the end of the play, Willy goes out to buy seeds for his garden, because he has "nothing in the ground". This is because Willy has worked his life for people to like him, to gain respect everywhere, and when it comes right down to it, he feels his sons don't like him, he got fired from his job because nobody likes him so he can't sell, and he feels as if it's all for naught. He even tells his neighbor Charlie that he feels Charlie is "his only friend". As the old saying goes, "You can't please everyone all the time, and the man who tries to please everyone ends up pleasing no one not even himself". You have to live your life to please One, that is, the Almighty God, and if you don't, you're going to fail in trying to please others.
Book Review: A Cruel Punishment To Students Everywhere
Summary: 1 Stars
Don't read it if you don't have to! Just because junk is old doesn't mean it's not junk. If a modern writer rolled out this garbage I doubt I would have been required to read it. I gave this book a one star rating because I don't think it's possible to rate a book no star... is it? There were so many things I disliked about this book, I wish I still had the book report to pinpoint them more clearly. I had to read this book in High School. I don't know why. I can't for the life of me see any educational value. And I don't just hate it because it's a bit of a snore...(which it was), but because if a teacher makes you read something you ought to come a way from it with some knowledge, a slightly greater understanding of the world or somesuch. No such luck! The story didn't have much of a point either. I just kept thinking "What is the point?" "What is the goal of this plot (if you can call it that)?" It was like watching a dead animal decompose only slower, not as interesting and most importantly COMPLETELY POINTLESS. There is also no likeable character to root for. The main character Is a lowdown good-for-nuthing who cheats on his wife, goes crazy (not out of guilt or anything) and can't stop feeling sorry for his pathetic self until he dies which would have been doing the world a greater favor had he completed the task on page one. His sons though still in control of they're mental facilities aren't much better. They're pigs in fact. I was especially fond of the part where they remember the girl who one of them lost his virginity to. The bother who had sex with her doesn't remember much except that she was fat and that the other brother "got him in there". *gag* The wife and mother in this family sickens me as well, but she is so deserving of pity how can I judge her. The more of a pathetic, low-down, cry baby slug her husband is the more she loves him, sad little doormat that she is. I think I remember her doing a lot of laundry too. Anyone who can put up with a life like that and still wash her stalkings without wrapping them securely around her husband's neck deserves one star I guess. In conclusion the only things I gained from this paltry little work are a numb behind, glazed over eyes, a slight pang of nausea and lastly the realisation that I had completey wasted several hours of my young life that can never be recaptured just to right a book report.Book Review: The quintessential American play
Summary: 5 Stars
Why has the play moved so many people? Why does it seem to say so much about America? Why is it so great?
One, I think it is because it is about the American dream of success. And it is about the tragic failure of its realization. And it is because it is about the whole question of honesty-dishonesty in the pursuit of success. And about family life and love , and what is really important in this.
It is too because the work is written in a beautiful, restrained American colloquial. The language of the book is a quiet poetry which moves with great great lines.
I think I saw the play on television, and perhaps in the movies long before I read it. The image of Lee J. Cobb as a floundering Willy Loman, a confused hero struggling for his life and dignity remains in mind. I believe it was Mildred Dunnock who played the faithful wife, the betrayed wife, the loving wife so effectively.
The story of Willy , the traveling salesman at the end of his career, fighting to maintain himself on a ' shoestring' and a
'story' cannot help but move. The real complication is Willy's relation to his family to the great promise of his son Biff who somehow fails in the same way his father does. Too much show, too much promo , too much trying to make it seem more and better than it really is.
And then too of course the painful reason, the central event told in flashback of the young man's coming to see his father on- the -road and discovering him with another woman in a shoddy hotel room. The sexual and familial betrayal is too a part of the tragedy which is of the family as a whole.
What Miller does however is not simply depict a faulty, failing Willy Loman he leads us to feel sympathy for him. This is the American dreamer (" A man's got to dream boy , it comes with the territory") And his wife's understanding even at the end also moves and adds a dimension of dignity . It seems to tell a lesson beyond success and failure i.e. that human dignity and respect should not depend upon ' making it' but must be given to each and every human being , and perhaps most especially precisely to those who fail.
This is a heartrending deep and beautiful play. And however haunted we may be by the fall of Willy Loman we come away from it with the sense that his life too, that each life too has a special meaning of its own.