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Death Of A Salesman Essay

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When it comes to the subject of success, and how to obtain it, it is almost impossible to find an agreement on how people feel like you can achieve such a thing. We see a prime example of this debate in Death of a Salesman, written by Arthur Miller. In this play, the characters Happy, Willy and Biff all struggle with the challenge of obtaining success. Though the three share the belief that the approval of others control success, they contrast in their belief on how important others approval is in relation to other characteristics of being successful; because Biff understands that hard work is a more effective in achieving success than popularity, he is the most likely to succeed and have a satisfied life.
The first character we are familiarized with is Willy, who is also Biff and Happy’s father. Willy is a firm believer that when it comes to obtaining success, “personality always wins the day” (Miller, 1868) over hard work. In the play, the reader is shown examples of Willy raising his sons to follow this type of belief. When Biff and Happy were children, Willy often taught his unworkable success lessons, one example is when he tells his sons “be liked and you will never want” (Miller, 1853). Alice Griffin writes that Willy has an “inability to distinguish between the dream of success and the reality of the world …show more content…
In the play, we see that the money and female acceptance that Happy tries to so hard to flaunt, ironically do not make him very happy. During a conversation with Biff, Happy expresses his lack of happiness by saying “But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, plenty of women, and still, goddamnit, I’m lonely.” (Miller, 1848) It is because of Happy’s unrealistic understanding of what actually makes him feel successful, that he will not be able

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