Psychological Profile Of Willy Loman

Willy Loman, the protagonist of Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, is one of the most recognizable characters in American drama. Willy has become synonymous with failure, the quintessential "Low-man" his surname suggests, although Miller claimed that the name derived from his memory of a character named Lohmann in the Fritz Lang movie The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The earliest working title of the play, "The Inside of His Head," further illustrates that Death of a Salesman is built around its central figure, a man whom Miller alternately describes as "a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions," and "a man who could never cease trying, like Adam, to name himself." Death of a Salesman ran for 742 performances and was the first drama ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play (Murphy, 65-98).

Willy Loman represents the forgotten "little man" in America, and Miller's play demands that "attention must be paid" to his struggles because they are so like our own. One of the hallmarks of Willy's character is how readily audiences and readers identify with him. Miller writes that director Elia Kazan was "the first of a great many men—and women—who would tell me that Willy was their father." A point of connection may be that Willy's life charts many of the cornerstones of American history. He is born at the closing of the American frontier (reflected in his father's "wagon"); he endures World War I and the Depression (the devastating effects of which are echoed throughout the play); and he chooses to end his life during one of the great economic booms in American history. Miller wrote that he hoped his play was "a time-bomb under American capitalism," undercutting the progressive optimism that ...