Death of a Salesman Afterword

I will admit, this play hit me in a way that seemed a bit too close to home. The struggles of all of the characters in the book I see or have seen throughout my life expressed in several different ways and have seen reactions to similarly to those of the book's characters. Death of a Salesman not only shows these scenarios and the reactions to them, but projects the emotions and personal feelings toward those actions the characters face to the audience, reflecting just how real the situation is where someone loses everything they hold to the highest degree in their life yet still can't face that reality of everything going from perfect to abysmal. How a house of card can come crashing down so quickly, to the point where some people might not find the willpower to go on living anymore after seeing how easily everything could've been fixed if they had just done this instead or not done anything at all. Death of a Salesman plays on everyone's biggest fear: the fear of failure, regret, and losing sight of the present. This is best expressed through Willy Loman, who is the embodiment of these fears coming to fruition in a person and the most focused main character in the play. Willy has lost all of his hopes and dreams in both his family and his career. His kids seem to have thrown away the future he thought they had and felt they needed to have a sustainable standard of living, even though he knows that he was the main cause of Biff's, the elder and most promising child in Willy's mind, failure and inability to finish high school that could have been easily averted. In addition to that, Willy has not reached the prestige and honor he thought he would have in the salesmanship area of business. All of the connections he had, or thought he had, have either died or never considered him their 'friend' in the first place. On top of that, he's now too old to have any hope of making any new connections and loses his job because of it. With everything in his life going bad, Willy does the only thing anyone in the same position would do: reminisce about when everything was all well and good, ignoring the reality of the situation he's in and never even wanting to acknowledge that it exists. Unfortunately, reality has its way of coming back to hurt anybody who ignores it. Willy feels the full force of this when he finally finds the point in his life that made everything go sour and believes that there's no hope for him any more. To me, this seems exactly what kind of downward spiral most people would fall into if they were to lose every hope, dream, and overall happiness in the real world. The human brain likes to feel happiness, so what it might end up doing is bring the past that made someone happy to the forefront of their consciousness so they can see a reason to continue. This can lead to that person seemingly become out-of-touch with everyone around them and even see their own futility (which can potentially lead to trying to 'end it all' so to speak). This is why this play hit me very close to home: I've sen what happens when someone loses everything or feels like they've lost everything. Just like in the story, it never ends up being pretty at the end.