His pathological visions of being successful and his ungrateful acceptance of his own American Dream push him to cause arguments within his family, envision suicidal thoughts and ultimately take his own life. Willie envisions his son, Biff, as this successful salesman that was a great football player, but Biff returns from the west as a confused bum. Willy becomes irritated by Biffs visit because of how he pictured Biffs’ life and the reality that he’s not a salesman. Charley and his son, Bernard, both become successful throughout the play and Willie troubles himself on what went wrong with his two boys. Why didn’t his sons become successful?
There is a common theme shared by Death of a Salesman and Fences, which is fatherhood. Both main characters, Willy and Troy, are difficult to judge whether they are bad fathers. It is clear that both of them have some troubles with their sons, but that is not because of the fathers hate their sons. Willy loves his son Biff just like Troy loves his Cory; both men devote themselves into making their own sons into better men. Willy Loman has an American dream that he wants to be success.
One play in which a character challenges the beliefs of others is Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman”. In the play main character Willy Loman challenges the beliefs of his son Biff and friend Charley. Miller effectively uses dramatic techniques such as symbolism and foreshadowing to portray these differences in beliefs. Willy believes in the ‘American Dream’ and believes that you have to be successful in life to be happy. Throughout the play Miller has Willy boast about his life to his family telling them how he is “vital in New England” and that “if old man Wagner were alive” he’d be in “charge of New York by now”.
A World of Guilt: Amir’s Struggle to Become a Better Man In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Amir struggles to become a man. His idealization of manhood is largely derived from the influence of his father his primary role model, Baba. Baba is a strong, assertive and confidant man in Amir’s eyes and despite their differences, Amir strives to embody this type of masculinity. However, Amir only becomes a better man when he is broken down and beaten into a humble man. Amir’s relationship to his mother, father and half brother, Hassan, are guilt ridden and strained.
The major conflict of this play is that Willy doesn’t realize he is losing his mind, but everyone around him does. Not wanting to embarrass Willy or make things any worse for him, his loved ones play along with him. Willy’s son, Biff, returns home from his failed life in the city to find out all this news from his mother. Your attention is gotten rather quickly when you realize, Willy, seemingly happy and content, is actually suicidal. In a somewhat sub-plot, Biff wants to try again at his city life and get a good job that will not only take care of his families’ financial problems, but will also make his father proud of him.
Willy Loman is the main character in the play. He is a 60-year-old traveling salesman. Willy works hard to provide for his family but his problem is that he wasted his life trying to seek the wrong product, his personality. He worked hard to gain wealth “…on the basis of being liked…” (). Willy says, “…It’s
Decline of a Family Although it is evident that Willy and Biff Loman are related, there are also many characteristics that set them apart. They are both misplaced and seem to embellish the facts on a regular basis. However, they differ in their accountability for their action and the way they think. Willy’s misplacement can be defined by the fact that he is a truly unsuccessful salesman who is convinced happiness comes from the wrong things in life. Instead of following his true talent of building and becoming a carpenter, he went down the wrong path in life for himself.
This once inner conflict soon becomes an outward conflict between Biff and Willy. Willy has a particular standards which he holds Biff to. Willy wishes for his eldest to be a salesman, as himself, absent-mindedly forgetting that his other son, Happy, has completed such a task and became the one thing he wanted for Biff. Willy is quite critical of Biff’s life choices, seeing them as failures, while Willy is losing his worldly possessions, his family and even his health because of said profession. Willy, himself, conformed rather than following his brother to Alaska, Africa or anywhere else.
Dreams play a vital role to the development of plot and character within Death of a Salesman; it drives the main characters with their need to obtain their aspirations to a point of obsession that dominates their lives. This never ending pursuit of a non-existent perfection is what leads Willy, Biff and Happy and those around them into a false idea of happiness. They believe that wealth and reputation are the path to success, unfortunately this road leads to only poor and selfish choices leaving everyone unsatisfied and full of regret. Willy’s dreams for himself and his sons set the stage for the novel’s sequence of events. They are the reason that Willy cannot seem to find success, and when he cannot meet his high expectations for himself, he lies and cheats in order to keep the unachievable ideal alive instead of being satisfied with less than perfect.
He is never satisfied with what he has and once he acquires what he wants he moves onto another dream. Such as after he changes his name and starts a new exciting life he dreams of being rich and powerful, then his dream is to win over a lost love and even after he has won over Daisy he still wants more from her which she is incapable of giving. Through Jay Gatsby’s tragic story, Fitzgerald is suggesting that the American Dream is unattainable if rooted in greed. Hickey suggests that he is also implying a warning to not future generations, “The Great Gatsby might be interpreted as a warning not only to Fitzgerald’s generation but to future generations as well. Beware of pursuing that “orgiastic future” with too much fervor; one might well be destroyed by it, just as Gatsby is.” (Hickey