Death of A Salesman

Rating:
Summary: Very Listenable
Review: I have listened to this tape over and over. It is a good recording of a very good cast and is one of my favorite tapes. If you are studying the play or just have some free time to listen, I would definitely recommend it. Dustin Hoffman's small part is so good! It is ironic that many years later he plays Willy Loman in the made for TV movie.

Rating:
Summary: Land of the free and the disillusioned
Review: Arthur Miller's _Death of a Salesman_ is classic Americana. It should be read by anyone wanting insight into the citizen-soul. This has always been the raw material of Arthur Miller's art. And it's more than that. _Death of a Salesman_ is an angle on the American Dream from a vantage of mistaken values. Willy Lohman, it seems, was a natural salesman. He could take a piece of truth and spin it into illusion. He could craft a dream with skill and genius and then cement the whole with stern conviction. To the salesman truth does not matter much anyway, it is all an illusion. Willy knows that people WANT to believe. So he tells them. But it rings hollowly within his own family after time. And that's the tragedy of Willy's life. He took the salesman home. You see, Willy knew the truth about himself, but kept it concealed. It only occassionally bared itself to his wife, Linda. This drama of Miller's is not about the death of Willy Lohman, but about the death of that "salesman" within him, that mirage of courage and conceit which sought to camouflage the real man even to his own sons. And that death should have occurred some years earlier when young Biff showed up at Willy's Boston hotel room and shattered his boyhood illusion of the father-hero. Willy, the dreamer of great things, was defeated by his own life. He sought the rainbow's end. It was the one delusion of his own existence, idealized by the chimera of his dead brother Ben who "walked into the jungle at 17 and came out at 21--rich." The secret which eluded Willy was not to be found in that sad disillusionment, nor in the loss of his eldest son's pride, nor even in the final undeniable failure of his own acomplishment. It lay in the simple fact, unbeknownst to Willy, that he was a man loved for who he was, not for who he wanted to be.

Rating:
Summary: To be...well liked?
Review: Often praised by too-sentimental audiences as being a modern-day tragedy, Death of a Salesman attempts to bring the situation of tragedy to the affairs of an average man, a simple salesman. Miller himself intended for his play to be a 'tragedy of the common man', as he wrote in an essay in the NY Times in 1949. Unfortunately, the play falls sadly below the tragic mark, being a tale, not necessarily 'signifying nothing', but certainly signifying nothing of the tragic condition of man. Willy Loman, fashioned as 'hero', is a man whose aspiration is to be 'well liked', not an aspiration to be frowned upon, but not a desire that would catapult him to tragic action. No, Willy Loman is a miserable and pathetic character, whose situation is to be pitied immensly, but he has not the greatness of character nor strength of will, nor anything akin to the Hellenic notion of Hubris, that can put him into the tragic category. He does not offend the heavens, his struggle is one of flesh alone, there is no transcendence. A stomachable play in its own right, and a fine job of characterisation, but not the stuff that tragedy is made of.

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest plays of all time.
Review: This is, without a doubt, the greatest American play ever written. In writing it, Arthur Miller set out to recapture the emotional power of Greek tragedy in a contemporary setting. And he succeeded. The play illuminates the lies inherent in the American dream in an emotionally shattering manner, by following one man's tragic failure to live up to his own ideals. It's one of the most powerful pieces of dramatic literature I've ever had the joy of reading.

Rating:
Summary: The first true modern American tragedy. A Masterpiece.
Review: Arthur Miller once said he wrote plays for people who didn't go to the theater. In "Death of a Salesman," pehaps his greatest play, Miller examines the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman at the end of his career, so wrought with regret, he lives in a theater of his own worst memories. After returning exhausted from a unsuccessful trip, Loman begins to break down under the burdens he carries: twenty years of secret affairs, his eldest son's terrific failure, and a lifetime of burned bridges and missed opportunities. Unable to find other work and incapable of accepting the modest successes in his life -- keeping a family together, finishing off a mortage -- Willy insists on measuring himself against an impossible yardstick and punishes himself by reliving the baleful trajectory of his life. "Death of a Salesman," is a poignant, sad, and moving work about the bottoming out of American promises, and unattainable pinnacle of masculinity.

Rating:
Summary: In business? Know anyone in direct sales?
Review: The stark reality is haunting. I have a
relative who fits poor Willy's description.
Business can be disasterous on those who don't
succeed. It is really a tragedy that I
recommend to fully pity the loser's point of view.

Rating:
Summary: Salesman in the story is us.
Review: As time go by, I could understand my father's position. My father isn't a salesman. I'm not a salesman, either. I didn't think that I'm gonna be .. when I was little. salesman! salesman! We are gonna be the position like the salseman in the story. We are forgotten it. I guess We should realize it. for survival.

Rating:
Summary: The book was depressing, but vividly so.
Review: An old, decaying traveling salesman, Willy Loman, has warped reality so incredibly in his mind that his family must present him with nothing but lies to keep him from utter insanity and suicide. He has two sons, Happy and Biff, who have of course been seriously deprived of reality themselves. Both of them know that their lives are not as they should be, and that they are living a lie, but Happy goes along with it. Biff wants to escape from his family, but Willy's need for control opposes Biff's desire for truth. Willy's wife Linda has a concept of reality, but represses it to keep Willy from killing himself. A book about misery should have some kind of hope within it, just as a dark cloud must have a silver lining. Death of a Salesman was great in relating human suffering and the nightmare that can arise from far too much lying, but it exaggerated the negative side of life, and for that reason it did not satisfy me as much as it could have.

Rating:
Summary: The first true modern American tragedy. A Masterpiece.
Review: Arthur Miller once said he wrote plays for people who didn't go to the theater. In "Death of a Salesman," pehaps his greatest play, Miller examines the life of Willy Loman, a traveling salesman at the end of his career, so wrought with regret, he lives in a theater of his own worst memories. After returning exhausted from a unsuccessful trip, Loman begins to break down under the burdens he carries: twenty years of secret affairs, his eldest son's terrific failure, and a lifetime of burned bridges and missed opportunities. Unable to find other work and incapable of accepting the modest successes in his life -- keeping a family together, finishing off a mortage -- Willy insists on measuring himself against an impossible yardstick and punishes himself by reliving the baleful trajectory of his life. "Death of a Salesman," is a poignant, sad, and moving work about the bottoming out of American promises, and unattainable pinnacle of masculinity.

Rating:
Summary: Arthur Miller's Most Brilliant Play
Review: It is a difficult task to review one's favorite play. I have known and loved DEATH OF A SALESMAN since I was sixteen years old; I am now twenty-five. Let me just say that, whether or not one considers DEATH OF A SALESMAN a tragedy, it is unquestionably one of the greatest dramas of the twentieth century; it is also the late Arthur Miller's greatest play. Like his ALL MY SONS (written in 1947, two years before SALESMAN), and like his subsequent THE CRUCIBLE and A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, DEATH OF A SALESMAN brings together the themes of familial responsibility, man's role in relation to his society, and the possibility -- or impossibility -- that an individual can lead a normal life after having committed a crime. Whereas in Joe Keller's (the protagonist of ALL MY SONS) case this is a crime against the "human family," Willy Loman, the titular salesman, betrays his own family. To the above-mentioned themes DEATH OF A SALESMAN adds one more: the dehumanizing effect of capitalism. Willy, having reached the retirement age without having achieved the success in his profession of which he always dreamed, has become a mere object to be discarded by the company for which he has worked for twenty-five years. ("You can't eat an orange and throw the peel away -- a man is not a piece of fruit!" Willy protests to his boss, Howard.) Where SALESMAN differs from ALL MY SONS is in its seamless integration of expressionist techniques, showing that Miller had learned from Tennessee Williams' 1947 play A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Under stress from guilt over his past "crime" as well as from the knowledge that he will soon be "thrown away" by the selling firm, Willy's mind wanders increasingly back to a past, happier year (1928 -- significantly, the year before the Great Depression began). Thus in SALESMAN past and present exist onstage simultaneously, and the stage itself is a map of Willy's mind. This is the true brilliance of the play.