How Death of a Salesman is a tragedy
...cause of this that Willy stops creating dreams of his own success and replaces them with lies about Biff's success. "How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there?" Biff tells Happy about his visit to see Bill Oliver. "I even believed myself that I'd been a salesman for him! And then he gave me one look and - I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We've been talking in a dream for fifteen years. I was a shipping clerk." (Miller 104) Towards the end of the play, Biff blames Willy for his unsuccessful career, "And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That's whose fault it is!" (Miller 131) With his lies about Biff's success that the entire Loman family came to believe, Willy is in great part responsible for Biff's failure and therefore the failure of his future as well. Another example of the negative effects Willy's lies has on his life deals with in incident in which Biff, having failed high school mathematics and being threatened with the possibility of not being permitted to graduate, visits his salesman father in New England and finds him in the company of an unfamiliar woman. "You fake!" Biff shouts at his father at this unexpected event. "You phony little fake! You fake!" (Miller 121) With this incident, Biff's discovery of his father's dishonesty, he does not go to summer school to make up for this failure in math, burns his sneakers on which he had previously printed 'University of Virginia,' and as his friend Bernard worded it, "gave up on his life." (Miller 94) Biff's unsuccessful career is a direct result of this incident, as otherwise, he would have been able to graduate from high school and go to the University of Virginia, where he would have gotten an education impressive enough for him to get a decent job. This incident is also the beginning of a conflict between Willy and Biff that breaks apart the Loman family in the sense that Willy no longer has a secure place in the family as a father. This way, Willy had failed not only as a salesman but as a father as well. This event is a great contributor to Willy's misfortunes, but Willy's mortal flaw of a form of dishonesty is not the only reason for the occurrence of this event. Like a tragedy should, there are uncontrollable elements that add to the misfortunes of the tragic protagonist in Death of a Salesman, and this event in which Biff discovers Willy's dishonesty is an example of this. It is merely coincidence and timing that brings Biff to Boston at two in the morning to find his father committing adultery. Willy had not been expecting Biff at all, least of all at that time of day. Another unc...