Death of a Salesman #1

This week, I diverted from my usual literature of chapter books and novels and chose something a little more...pre-fabricated, plays. Plays are pretty much a whole different species of book when it comes to the literature world. They are usually done as a live action or visual performance first before becoming a book, which causes them to lose some of their imaginative potential (especially if someone has already seen the visual version). However, I still enjoy reading them and imagining all of the different versions of written plays that could possibly make sense to different target audiences. Anyway, the play I chose to read for the past week was Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. The play follows a salesman, Willy, and his family. Willy is an old man who can’t get over the fact that his first son, Biff, is not nearly as successful as he had hoped back when he was a football star in high school. This has caused him to become disillusioned from reality and look upon ‘the good old days’ instead of what is actually happening around him. Biff and his brother, Happy, visit Willy one day to try and fix Biff’s discord with his father by getting him a real job. Ultimately, this fails since Biff never graduated high school, but Willy won’t accept the truth that Biff isn’t known as well anymore as when he was a football player. Instead, Willy tries to have Biff lie to him, but his persistence to tell the truth leads to Willy going into a fit that only bad things happen to him because Biff flunked high school. The play appears to be mainly about the American Dream and how not everyone can attain their dreams and, instead of changing their dreams to be more attainable, live in self denial that they could never not attain their dream of success. The play currently has me on a cliffhanger which I am desperate to resolve and seems to be able to keep any reader’s interest. I wonder where the plot will progress from there.