Critical quotations on Death of Salesman

Quotations from critics in the 1950s.

"The play explores the salesman idea of success with an angry but discerning eye."

Miller:

'The trouble with Willy Loman is that he has tremendously powerful ideals...he is seeking for a kind of ecstasy in life.

If Willy Loman had not had a very profound sense that his life as lived had left him hollow, he would have died contentedly polishing his car on some Sunday afternoon at a ripe old age. The fact is he has values. The fact that they cannot be realized is what is driving him mad....

'It's obvious that Willy Loman can't be an average American man, at least from one point of view:  he kills himself.....

Willy Loman is a person who embodies in him some of the most terrible conflicts running through the streets of America today.

....I was trying in Salesman to set forth what happens when a man does not have a grip on the forces of life and has no sense of the values which will lead him to that kind of a grip; but the implication of it was that there must be such a grasp of those forces - or else we're doomed'.

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Death of  a Salesman has been termed a 'tragedy for extroverts' to help account for the way in which Willy Loman does not seem to fit the more introspective type of the tragic hero (e.g. Hamlet).


Miller stated that all 'great drama' is concerned with some aspect of a single problem: 'How may a man make of the outside world a home?' How can a man find 'the safety, the surroundings of love, the ease of soul, the sense of identity and honour which, evidently, all men have connected in their memories with the idea of family?'

This seems to be what Willy wants, he wants a home, he wants to be recognised and loved:

And when I saw that, I realised that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?'