Death of a Salesman

Revisiting works I read as an adolescent seems to be taking up most of my 'book time' these days, but the returns are always rewarding.
When I first read the play I must have been 18...I found it very sad and I couldn't stop wondering why someone would be so full of angst that he hasn't made much money (those were the days of lost ideals you see...)

I am not sure how many of my friends at college (where I was at 18) understood it either, where it was even staged as a semester-play ( in Hindi as "Ek Sapney ki Maut"?)... Somebody must have I guess, if they were moved enough to stage an almost professional version of the play... but the chap who played Biff Loman went on to become a MBA in real life...

Now I read it as a Salesman myself...

The portrait of the Salesman as a man who has believed his own advertisement is a little off-target (having been written by an intellectual with a third-person view) but his struggle with failure seems so true.

Locked in with a society which would never admit its failures, the Salesman struggles to keep himself afloat in a sea of lies that he hopes to sell to the world and to himself. His only ambition is acceptance into a mythical realm of winners,which he hopes he could grasp by the successful sale of lies...

But the very act of sale is a lie...to sell the lie you have to believe the lie yourself-the lie that a sale of a lie is a shot at immortality.It doesn't take much to see that there is no glory in the sale-two large pegs can tell the Salesman that...but once he is into it there is no turning back. Nor are there second chances...

The tale of the Salesman's family is worse. They inherit the lies and take the baton even as they see the lies fall apart. Their doubts will soon be blown away by the society they live in. The wife weaps cries of freedom at the grave of the Salesman on the payment of the mortgage...a sign that the race with no end is on again.

My Penguin book's introduction says that someone called the play, on it's opening night, "a time bomb under American capitalism"

This was Arthur Miller's reponse- "...or at least under the bullshit of capitalism; this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator... waving a paid up mortgage at the Moon, victorious at last..."

Got to go now! Client on the phone!