Act 2 (part 1)

From the beginning of Act 2 until the line:

Happy: No, that's not my father. He's just a guy. Come on, we'll catch Biff, and, honey, we're going to paint this town! Stanley, where's the check! Hey, Stanley!

At the end of Act 1, the audience was left with hope with Biff and Happy looking forward to a new deal and with Willy looking forward to a new job in New York. This optimism lasts for only a short while into Act 2 as Willy and Linda talk about how they are almost out of debt for the first time in twenty-five years. Willy also brings up the first mention of the garden as he questions whether “beets would grow there”. Willy’s curiosity of whether the beets can grow there and his failure to do so symbolize Willy’s dreams for his children and for himself. Just like these seeds that have been able to grow despite the “so many times” that Willy has tried, Willy has never been able to support his family with “fruit”, in his case money or food. Not only that, but the failed seeds are also a symbol for Willy’s “failure” to nurture and care for Biff as he wanted to. When we see the scenes between Young Biff and a past version of Willy, there is a noticeable difference in that they don’t argue and Biff actually listens to his father. Biff was supposed to be the successful one after high school. He was offered scholarships to universities, was the star player on the football team, and was very popular in school. In many ways I see similarities between the character of Biff and the character of Jim O’Conner from Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Both were very successful in high school but burned out as soon as they realized the harshness of the real world. Going back to the usage of the seed as a symbol, Willy’s diversion about the growing of beets in the garden serves as a foreshadowing of the unveiling of how Biff came to be where he is now due to the actions of Willy.

The happiness and hope that is seen in the beginning of the act does not last very long especially as Willy gets rejected and fired from his job by his boss. Miller uses this scene to position the audience to feel pity for Willy. Up until this point, the only reason that I had to feel pity for Willy was when he confessed to Linda that he was not selling as much as he did before because people didn’t like him due to his rotund physical appearance. However, Miller uses the speech between Willy and his boss Howard to show disrespect that Willy endures through to keep his job. Howard continuously cuts Willy off with a “Sh! For God’s sake!” and other such rude, exclamatory phrases and keeps calling him the degrading term “kid” until he (Howard) realizes that Willy should be in Boston. Despite Willy’s pleading for a job in New York with little pay, Howard refuses to give Willy a different job. In his desperateness, Willy brings up the fact that he helped Howard’s father name him and the honor that is placed in that position. Yet this concept of honor has long been disregarded in the business world. Honor and the concept of being “well liked” are both things that are unnecessary to be a good and successful salesman. However, Willy is unable to understand that “business is business” and during his entire life, he reveals, that he has always believed that “selling was the greatest job that any man could want” because he falsely examined the life of Dave Singleman, a man who was still a salesman at age 84. He believes that it is a job that allows one “to be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people”. Willy fails to see that Singleman only seemed “well liked” because his job required him to be in contact with many people and that Singleman’s funeral that was attended by “hundreds of salesman and buyers” did not mean that he was loved but that once again he knew many people in his life.

Willy has come to believe that the way to success is to be loved by many people but he does not realize that by always looking to please people all the time, it will be impossible to actually have a meaningful life with loved ones (thus the problem that Biff, who was taught these values by Willy, is having). When he visits Charley’s office and talks to a grown up Bernard, Willy tries to see what exactly it was that went wrong in Biff’s life that prevented him from becoming as successful as Bernard. When Willy realizes that it was his actions on a certain day that was the catalyst for Biff’s failure he immediately becomes defensive and tells Bernard to stop “blaming it on [him]”. Willy’s pride ends up being his ultimate downfall.