Community Read Progress (Act 1)

For my community read book I chose Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. The book follows around the Loman family, specifically the character of Willy Loman as he sees where he is now and remembers the good old days of promise and hope. What makes this book interesting is the audience is given Willy's entire way of thinking and mental state throughout the play. This, however, is not like the audience is getting everything translated from Willy's mind, however. What the audience truly gets is the completely raw, hysteric information that runs through Willy's head at any given moment, mainly being a flashback to the past and the thought of how things used to be so good for Willy back then with a comparison thrown in from the reality he lives in currently. This consistent and sometimes unexpected jolting from past to present, then back to the past soon reveals Willy's true psychological condition that his family sees to the audience and just how it feels to be in the middle of that hysteria. Constantly being reminded of failures that prevented the metaphorical gold medal of life for him from ever being reached, of how the going was so good that overconfidence caused several missteps, and how all of those missteps have led to Willy crashing down the stairs, so to speak. His warped psychological state is truly shown when Willy contradicts himself in his own speech and yet fails to realize it. This is best reflected when Willy tells his wife, Laura, that "Biff [his son] is a lazy bum!" (Miller 5) yet just a few seconds later he says "There's one thing about Biff-he's not lazy." (Miller 6). Laura doesn't even give examples of how Biff isn't lazy, Willy just changes his mind right on the spot without even acknowledging or realizing what he said previously. In the play, it's unknown up to this point what specifically causes this seeming mental discourse inside Willy's mind. It's evident to the audience that it's because of his inability to be successful, but the book has yet to reveal what specifically made success completely unobtainable. This method of approaching the plot is very intriguing to say the least. It leaves the audience 'in the dark', forcing them to reflect on what they would define as a personal world-ending event which brings out the same amount of fear and dread in the audience that Willy Lowman has for his family and the future. The book is able to put the audience in the same desperate circumstances as Willy without ever requiring the audience to have experienced a similar ordeal in the past. This makes the book fantastic to read and all the more enveloping for the audience. It's able to hit close to home just enough to make everyone concerned if they might one day experience the same fate as Willy Lowman; unsuccessful and washed-up to the point where there is seemingly no way out of this endless pit of grief and despair.