In the play Death of a Salesman written by Arthur Miller, Willy Loman is the tragic hero. A tragic hero is someone with the dedication to die for a belief, but also someone who has a tragic flaw or limitation. He is the tragic hero because his whole life is an illusion, which uses the past and mistakes it for the future. This causes him to suffer from a mental imbalance. He therefore never became aware of himself, and lingers on to the American Dream. He always wants to make Biff a person who he never could be with the influence of his past. His lingering in the past finally leads him to his ultimate suffering; death in a form of suicide.

Willy always wanted success so badly that he lost a realistic sense of himself. One can see this coming forth because

Willy is "a little boat looking for his harbor" (pg 59). He is a "low man" of society; this being his last name already shows the reader that the main character is a failure and really describes who Willy really is. He is not a deep character but still manages to be driven by his first name Willy, or "willfulness." Willy is a man who wants to reach one goal in his life or believes that life is useless, the goal is unreachable that he has set for himself, and therefore kills himself. He has nothing to live for except to make his family happy and not to end up with his family living without a roof over their heads. He is a simple man with many complications, for example he is obsessed with the past and throughout the entire play, and because of that he keeps referring to the past. It is as if he lingers on it to see if he could ever change time or even go back in time. Willy is haunted by his unhopeful life. Ben, his dead brother, even says that Willy is like "a diamond is rough and hard to the touch" (pg 107). This shows that his life insurance of twenty thousand dollars is a metaphorical diamond. Willy seems through this quotation to be worth more dead than alive.

Arthur Miller's idea of Willy is good, because although the whole play is based on Willy and his problems a lot of others are included. This allows Willy to be who he is and finally in the end deal with

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Approximate Word count = 927
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)