Act 1

The first act of Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, introduces us to the issues that the play deals with as well as the personalities of the characters and their relationship with one another. The production notes that Miller gives at the beginning of the script is very similar to the way that Tennessee Williams’ wrote production notes at the beginning of The Glass Menagerie, perhaps showing a popular style used by playwrights writing memory plays. Miller tells us a variety of things through these opening notes such as meticulous details for the set and characteristics of the characters in the play even before we see them on stage. Most of the play takes place in a “small, fragile-seeming” two-story house that is surrounded by tall apartment buildings. Miller tells us that an “air of dream clings to the place” perhaps implying that the house was once a symbol of the free and removed from the city lifestyle that the Loman family (the main characters in the play) longed for. However, now with the apartment buildings surround the house, the house seems like a trap, lending itself to be a symbol for the imprisonment of certain characters, in particular the father Willy Loman. The use of the set and its boundaries to show the difference between events in the past and the present was also mentioned in the notes, foreshadowing the possibility of scenes that intertwine both the past and the present. To be honest, I couldn’t understand how the stage actually looked and how it would be used in the play until I drew it:

As mentioned before, Miller uses the stage directions to characterize Willy and Linda Loman. We are told that Willy is the salesman, meaning that he is the character that will die (an implication taken from the title). The directions that Miller gives in this paragraph to describe Willy’s first entrance on the stage are interesting in that they are very vague, allowing the actor to bring the character of Willy alive through whatever mannerisms he deems fitting for the character. However despite this apparent freedom that Miller allows, Miller’s vision for the character and what the audience should be seeing overall is very precise. For example, Willy comes in the house “dressed quietly” with two large suitcases and when he reaches the kitchen, he “thankfully sets his burden down”. Through this entire non spoken segment Willy’s actions are supposed to express his exhaustion. As we can see, there is no specific direction about Willy’s actions other than the fact that he comes into the house and that he puts down the suitcases in the kitchen. But Miller’s description of Willy and the actor’s portrayal of Willy is used straight from the beginning of the play to instill in the audience a sympathy for the hard life that this man, “past sixty years of age”, has.

As for the character of Linda, I believe that Miller explains her personality more in the beginning in order to justify her actions and speech in this play. Linda doesn’t have as many lines as anyone in the Loman family, not only that but she seems to be completely tolerant of Willy’s schizophrenic behavior and lack of respect for her. Personally, I thought that Miller established Linda as the mediator of the family. She is the one who calms down her sons when they are irritated by their father’s mumbling and the one who listens to Willy’s rambling with unfailing patience and calmness. It is simply her love for Willy and nothing else that allows her to tolerate Willy’s commanding and disrespectful attitude towards her.

With the introduction of the other characters, such the Loman sons, Happy and Biff, Willy’s brother Ben, and his neighbor, through dialogue, I believe that Miller positions us to feel pity for Willy. He is man whose brain vacillates from being in the past and the present. We see this through the way he interacts with people of the past while talking to people of the present. As mentioned earlier, the audience can differentiate between the two through the stage directions involving the set boundaries. Also the symbolism of the flute is realized much more towards the end of the act. Willy wants the best for both of his sons and in the past he believed that if they just put their mind to it, they would easily beat anyone else out there and be successful. Yet Willy defines success as the amount of money one has and how “well liked” one is while both Happy and Biff define success differently. Biff longs just be content and to come to a point where he can happily say that he isn’t wasting his life while Happy wants to “outbox, outrun, and outlift” anyone with a better social status than him.