Willy Loman is a tired old man. The stage directions at
the opening of the play tell us a great deal about Willy
–
He is past sixty years of age, dressed
quietly…his exhaustion is
apparent.
Miller
also details some of Willy’s emotional characteristics here to give us a deeper view of
him –
…his mercurial nature, his temper, his
massive dreams and little
cruelties.
His
early words are weighty and tinged with foreboding and his forth line in the play could
be his epitaph –
WILLY: I am tired to the death…I couldn’t make
it. I just couldn’t make it,
Linda.
Willy is
clearly suffering from mental exhaustion as we see him slip in and out of the past and
present, and hear him speculate on a possible imagined future as directed by his
brother, Ben. He replays events in a bid to absolve himself of the responsibility of his
mistakes and weaknesses, and his anger at his own failure is
palpable.
His interactions with Charley and Linda
illustrate the mercurial nature Miller hinted at. His change of temperament is one of
the traits that will have made him less and less successful. When he tells Linda that he
overheard another salesman calling him a ‘walrus’ he had responded by hitting the man.
Willy’s fragile mental state causes him to draw people close to him and then push them
away.
We see that he is physically ‘foolish’, stubborn,
proud and riddled with guilt for the brief affair, which tainted his marriage and
destroyed his relationship with his eldest son.
No comments:
Post a Comment