The level of language of Death of a Salesman has long been a subject of critical discussion. Perhaps because Arthur Miller compared his work to ancient Greek tragedy in which poetic or elevated language was a requirement, early critics responded negatively to Miller's demotic English. T. C. Worsley wrote that the play fails in its “attempt to make a poetic approach to everyday life without using poetry …” (225). Similarly, John Gassner noted that the play “is well written but is not sustained by incandescent or memorable language …” (232). However, later critics have pointed out that Miller does make use of poetic devices. Arthur K. Oberg commented on his patterned speech, striking images, and artful cliches (73, 74, 77), while Marianne Boruch discussed his use of objects as metaphors. Finally, Lois Gordon described the entire play as a “narrative poem whose overall purpose can be understood only by consideration of its poetic as well as narrative elements” (98-99).

Miller's poetic use of demotic English, the level of language which characters speak and which describes their actions and environment, creates the play's tragic dimension. To achieve the depths of tragedy, Miller expands the ordinarily limited expressive capabilities of demotic English by exploiting the sounds and multiple meanings of simple verbal, visual, and numerical images. Words for ordinary objects, daily activities, geographical places, and conventional relationships also function as puns and homonyms which recall meanings from other contexts and establish new ones. The resulting verbal patterns and images form an interconnected and multileveled network of associated meanings which exist in two temporal perspectives: chronological time and construct in which meaning echo and mirror each other, creating nightmarish repetition and a sense of stasis. The network of demotic language, which generates these two perspectives, forms an image of Willy's demented psyche and tragic fate. Giles Mitchell points out that Willy suffers from a personality disorder, pathological narcissism, which demands “grandiosity, omnipotence and perfection” (391) rather than normal achievement. Willy's madness is like a fatal flaw, which blinds him to his reality and fills him with arrogance or hubris so that he challenges the limits of his humanity. Then, like an offended god who punishes hubris, Willy's psyche drives him to suicide which he insanely believes will result in his apotheosis. Members of the audience respond with pity and fear to Willy's fate, for the psyche, which is ultimately incomprehensible, is a reality in their own lives and Willy's fate might have been theirs. Moreover, Biff's merciful release from Willy's dreams into normal life does not mitigate this response, for Biff's good fortune underlines the psyche's capriciousness.

1

The play's dominant metaphor is the polyvalent image of time. On the one hand, metaphors for chronological time represent physical reality and normal human development from youth to maturity to old age and from one generation to the next. Linda, Charley, and his son Bernard and Frank Wagner and his son Howard live in harmony with chronological time, a condition which Biff achieves after he experiences a profound psychological change. On the other hand, images of stasis represent personality disorders which afflict Willy, Happy, and Biff.

The play's three-part temporal setting—night, the next day, and the following night—indicates the progression of chronological time. But on another level, the temporal setting is an image of containment and stasis which alludes to the play's primary subject, Willy's imprisonment in neurosis and his consequent death. The nighttime settings, along with Willy's ominous cliches, “I'm tired to the death” (13) and “I slept like a dead one,” (71) portend his suicide. Moreover, although the daytime setting during act 2, before Willy goes out for the day, Linda mentions a grace period to him (72). The grace period, the time before their insurance premium is due, also alludes to Willy's beliefs that on this day his employer will give him a non-traveling job and that Biff will get a loan to go into business with Happy. The grace period, however, does not give rise to the fulfillment of Willy's desires, but proves to be a mocking prelude to his death.

Much of the play takes place in a psychological construct which Willy creates. An Eden-like paradise which lies at the center of his neurosis, it is characterized by the paradoxical union of reality and his delusory fulfillment of his grandiose dreams of omnipotence. Willy's paradise is identified with the time in which Biff and Happy were growing up in Brooklyn, when they expressed, reflected, and validated his belief in their virtual divinity. Willy ironically incorporated the human concept of progress and the future, time's movement, into his changeless paradise. He believed that Biff, who was already “divine” as a football player, would become more so as a businessman. However, before Biff realized Willy's projected future, he lost faith in Willy's dreams, left the state of mind or paradise Willy had created, and destroyed its coherence. As a result, Willy moved from the condition of stasis to one characterized by a confusion of the present and his fragmented paradise. Willy never experiences the future which is part of normal chronological time because he recognizes only the hyperbolic future which he believes is latent in his paradise. To his destruction, he seeks to actualize it.

Images which Willy uses to express his beliefs in his and his sons' divine power suggest the opposite, powerlessness, or allude to and echo events which undercut his extravagant claims. Confusing divine omnipotence with his sons' good looks and personalities, Willy compares them to Adonis, and implies that their inherent qualities will make them successful businessmen just as the inherent power of gods allow them to achieve without effort:

That's why I thank Almighty God you're both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want …

(33)

Willy points to himself as an exemplar of his beliefs, using his name as a manifestation of his omnipotence.

You take me for instance. I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. … “Willy Loman is here!” That's all they have to know, and I go right through.

(33)

Elaborating on name imagery that echoes his own grandiose self-assessment, Willy expresses his belief in Biff's omnipotence and predicts limitless success for his future in business: “And Ben! When he walks into a business office his name will sound out like a bell and all the doors will open to him!” (86). Name imagery, however, also reveals Willy and Biff's failures. In reality, Willy has been working on commission “like a beginner, an unknown” (57). After he overhears Biff tell Linda and Happy that businessmen have laughed at him for years (61), he pathetically asserts his importance by using names:

They laugh at me, heh? Go to Fileno's, go to the Hub, go to Slattery's, Boston. Call out the name Willy Loman and see what happens! Big Shot!

(62)

Name imagery also reveals Biff's failure to develop a career. When he attempted to meet with Bill Oliver, a businessman, he waited in Oliver's reception room, and “[k]ept sending [his] name in” (104), but it meant nothing to Oliver, and his door remained closed. Moreover, when announcing a name, ringing a bell, and opening a door constitute the dramatic action, it contrasts Willy's belief in his omnipotence with his base behavior. Upon Biff's arrival at Willy's hotel, he asks the telephone operator to ring his room to announce his arrival; when Biff opens the door to Willy's room, he discovers Willy's adultery.

Willy believes that Biff's success as a high school football player is proof of his divinity. As he talks to Ben about him, he points to Biff who stands silently by them like a divine presence. Biff wears his school sweater, symbolic of his athletic career, carries a suitcase, which alludes to Willy and his job as a traveling salesman and to Biff's projected future as a businessman. Happy, like an attendant to a god, carries Biff's regalia, his shoulder guards, gold helmet, and football pants (86). Willy, who believes that Biff, like his gods, fulfills his adage, “Be liked and you will never want” (33), momentarily turns from Ben to remind Biff of his god-like condition and responsibilities: “And that's why when you get out on that field today it's important. Because thousands of people will be rooting for you and loving you” (86).

This iconic image of Biff, however, also alludes to other incidents which occur in reality and prove Willy's beliefs empty. The suitcase suggests Biff's trip to Boston where he discovers his father's betrayal of him and Linda, and his football uniform, which marks the height of his achievement, also points to his failure to graduate from high school. He dropped out and spent the next seventeen years moving from one marginal job to another.

Football imagery not only separates Biff from Willy, but also connects him with Miss Francis and alludes to Willy's having betrayed him. At the Boston hotel, after Willy attempts to deny his relationship with Miss Francis and tells her to leave his room, she turns to Biff and asks, “Are you football or baseball?” “Football,” he replies. “That's me too,” she says (119-20).

Gardening and building images are also used to express the madness of Willy's paradisiacal state of mind. Willy points out the bucolic aspects of Brooklyn when it was his paradise:

This time of year it was lilac and wisteria. And then the peonies would come out, and the daffodils. What fragrance in this room!

(17)

Willy continues to use garden imagery to contrast the satisfaction and joy he took in the past when his paradise was intact with the anger he feels toward the urban present when his paradise is fragmented by the increase in traffic and the number of apartment houses (17). As Willy goes on, however, he unwittingly alludes to himself as the destroyer of his garden and of his family in a metaphorical sense: “Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? … They should've arrested the builder for cutting those down …” (17). On one level, the two trees are allusions to the Tree of Life and the Tree of Good and Evil, echoes of Willy's Edenic paradise. On another level, the trees allude to Biff, who uses plant imagery to explain his failure to achieve a career—“I just can't take hold, Mom. I can't take hold of some kind of a life” (54)—and to Happy. The builder whom Willy complains about refers to himself, for he has the skills of a carpenter and rebuilds much of his house: “All the cement, the lumber, the reconstruction I put in this house! There ain't a crack to be found in it any more” (74). Willy's house, however, which is a sound structure as a result of his efforts, is a metaphor for his mind, an air-tight prison which confines him in neurosis. Miller reverses the slang use of the word “crack” as “crazy” to suggest that Willy might have escaped his insanity if his house/mind had had a crack in it to allow help to reach him.

Because of his madness, Willy, who literally rebuilds his house, destroys it in the metaphorical sense of progeny or line of descent.

LINDA:
Well, it [their house] served its purpose.
WILLY:
What purpose? … If only Biff would take this house, and raise a family. …

(74)

Ironically, the metaphorical level of language reveals that Charley, who does not have the skills of a carpenter, has successfully built where Willy has failed. Charley's son Bernard matured in harmony with chronological time. He completed his education, became a lawyer, married and had two children. He met mundane expectations, paradoxically only to exceed them. When Willy meets Bernard in Charley's office, he is about to leave for Washington, D.C. To argue a case in the highest arena in his profession, the Supreme Court. The word “supreme,” which recalls the “S” on Biff's high school sweater (28) and Willy's belief that Biff would become a superman, mocks Willy's deluded hope and recalls that seventeen years earlier Biff played in a championship football game at prestigious Ebbets Field, but did not go on to a career of any kind. “His life ended after that Ebbets Field game,” confides Willy to Bernard (92). He “laid down and died like a hammer hit him!” (93). Ironically, Willy's reference to a hammer, a tool used to build, points to the fact that he, himself, is Biff's destroyer. The image of the hammer mocks Willy who failed as a father by echoing the insulting statement he made to Charley: “A man who can't handle tools is not a man. You're disgusting” (44). It also mocks Biff's failure to become a professional athlete and alludes to Charley and Bernard's professional success: “Great athlete! Between him and his son Bernard they can't hammer a nail! (51),” says Willy contemptuously. Willy's hammering in his garden at night, a negative image of creation, mirrors his tragic reversal of life and death—his belief that he will achieve the future which his neurosis demands by committing suicide.

Like Willy's garden, his Chevy symbolizes his paradise and the particular satisfaction he takes in the mutually reflective relationship he has with his sons. He associates the Chevy with the abundance of nature: “But it's so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield [of the Chevy] and just let the warm air bathe over me” (14). The care his son bestowed upon the Chevy represents their past admiration for each other: “Ts. Remember those days? The way Biff used to simonize that car? The dealer refused to believe there was eighty thousand miles on it” (19). “Simonizing” or “waxing,” a pun on Willy's waxing euphoric, alludes to the fullness of emotion he experienced in their relationship.

The Chevy, however, is also associated with the personal and professional failures that the Lomans experience in reality. The car is connected through numbers with the great football career Willy believed that Biff would have as a result of his playing quarterback in a championship game at Ebbets field. In response to his friend Charley's skepticism, Willy yells, “Touchdown! Touchdown! Eighty-thousand people! … (90), echoing the eighty thousand miles on the car. And when Willy tried to convince Howard to give him a non-traveling job, Willy recalls the year 1928, the model of the Chevy, as the height of his professional success and acceptance in the business world: “[I]n 1928 I had a big year … (82).”

Images of geographical expansiveness further reflect Willy's emotional inflation and the inevitable collapse that results from it. In his description of a business trip, Willy evokes and identifies with the grandeur of New England and its history. However, the names of the cities along his route, which is a metaphor for the downward course of his life, are not only images of aggrandizement but of pain that Willy and Biff suffer after their inflated emotions collapse. Providence, the name of Willy's first stop, is presided over by a mayor whose title suggests an eponymous deity. Rather than providing Willy with care and benevolent guidance, however, the mayor of Providence confers a malign fate on him, as the names of the other places on his route attest. “Waterbury, a big clock city” (31), is an image of time which mocks the Loman's and their dreams of success. Moreover, it is also an allusion to Willy's attempt to commit suicide by driving his car into a river (59). Willy's praise of “Boston, the cradle of the Revolution” (31), presages Biff's disillusionment with Willy from him after finding him in a Boston hotel in an adulterous relationship. Portland is the city Willy is unable to reach because of his mental breakdown. Metaphorically, Portland suggests Willy's failure to achieve “port” or fulfillment that he might have expected during the last years of his career. Along with the word “boat,” “Portland” alludes to Willy's insane conviction that his dreams will become reality through suicide. Linda, who pities Willy and understands him as a man who has failings, but not as a neurotic, asks Biff to be “sweet' and “loving” to him “[b]ecause he's only a little boat looking for a harbor” (76). The image becomes horrific just prior to his suicide when he psychologically joins Ben, who acts as a Charon figure to bring him to port in the land of the dead.

BEN:
Time, William, Time! …
(Looking at his watch) The boat. We'll be late. (He moves slowly off into the darkness.)

(135)

Bangor, the name of the last city on Willy's route, onomatopoetically explodes—“bang!”—echoing imagery of emotional inflation and collapse associated with Willy's paradisiacal past. Years after Biff became disillusioned with Willy, he uses imagery of inflation to blame Willy for his failure to achieve a career: “… I never got anywhere because you [Willy] blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody” (131). And he accuses Happy of being a liar: “You big blow, are you the assistant buyer? You're one of the two assistants to the assistant, aren't you?” (131). The group of three which Biff describes forms a deflated parallel to the one Willy once imagined would create a sensation upon entering the Boston stores—Biff and Happy accompanying him, carrying his sample bags: “Oh, won't that be something! Me comin' into the Boston stores with you boys carryin' my bags” (31). In the light of the Loman's' lack of success, the bags, suggestive of wind-bags, reflect, finally, the burden of Willy's meretricious beliefs and the unfounded grandiosity that Biff and Happy bore.

Ultimately, images of inflated emotion and collapse cruelly come together in the word “blow,” meaning “to treat” as well as “a violent impact,” and in the name of the restaurant, “Frank's Chop House.” The name “Frank” recalls Frank Wagner, who has been replaced by his heartless son, and “chop”, which literally refers to a cut of meat, also means “a sharp blow.” In anticipation of getting a loan to establish a sporting goods business, Biff asks Linda to invite Willy to a celebration at Frank's Chop House: “Tell Dad, we want to blow him to a big meal” (74).

Willy expects to make the dinner a dual triumph. He feels sure that his current employer, Howard Wagner, will give him the non-traveling job that he wants. That evening, however, when the three Loman's meet, Willy announces that Howard fired him, and Biff reluctantly tells Willy that Bill Oliver did not give him the loan. When Biff orders drinks that evening, “Scotch all around. Make it doubles” (105), he unwittingly signifies their dual failures.

2

Hidden in Willy's images of a past paradise is an Eve-like temptress, a personification of his neurosis. This ambiguous character, who is a siren on one level and Miss Francis, the woman with whom Willy commits adultery on another, stands in opposition to Linda who is associated with the diurnal rhythms of chronological time and mundane reality. The strength of Willy and Biff's disordered relationship is tested and broken when Willy introduces Miss Francis to him at the Boston hotel. Willy's adultery is obvious, but Willy wants Biff to deny what he sees and understands:

[N]ow listen pal, she's just a buyer. … Now stop crying and do as I say. I gave you an order. Biff, I gave you an order!

(120)

Biff, however, does not comply. Seventeen years later, the word “order” echoes Willy's loss of power over Biff in a conversation in which Willy and Bernard talk about Biff's failure to make up a high school math course.

BERNARD:
Did you tell him [Biff] not to go to summer school?
WILLY:
Me? I begged him to go. I ordered him to go!

(93)

Mathematics, a metaphor for order in mundane reality, and Mr. Birnbaum, its personification, also reveal the damage that Willy does by taking over Biff's life and preventing him from maturing in chronological time. Biff's age, seventeen, and the four points by which he fails math echo and contrast with Ben's achievement. Ben, Willy's dead brother and his image of an ideal business man, was seventeen when he set out to make his fortune. Four years later, he was rich (48). The repetition of “seventeen” and “four” also contrasts Biff's stasis with Bernard's progress in chronological time. Seventeen years after Biff failed math at the age of seventeen, he has no career, but Bernard has become a lawyer. When Willy congratulates him on his success, he alludes to Biff's failure: “I'm—I'm overjoyed to see how you made the grade, Bernard, overjoyed” (92).

Mathematics and Mr. Birnbaum reveal the meretriciousness of Willy's dream. Mr. Birnbaum rejects Willy's conviction that personal attractiveness is more important that actual achievement and refuses to give Biff the four points he needed to pass, thus motivating his trip to Boston. Birnbaum's name comments on the consequences of the trip for both Biff and Willy. As Karl Harshbarger noted, the first syllable in “Birnbaum” is reminiscent of fire and the second one means “tree” in German (58). The whole name echoes Willy's cry of disaster, “the woods are burning” (41, 107). Willy uses the phrase to signify trouble just before he tells Biff and Happy that he was fired. In the circumstances, it is a double pun. At the hotel, Willy, who knows that Biff is knocking on the door of his room, refuses to open it, but The Woman insists: “Maybe the hotel's on fire!” (116). Her exclamation echoes Willy's locution and alludes to imminent disaster for him—Biff's recognition of his duplicity.

After Biff tells Willy why he came to the hotel, he imitates Mr. Birnbaum as he did for his classmates at school:

… I got up at the blackboard and imitated him. I crossed my eyes and talked with a lithp. … The thquare root of thixthy twee is …

(118)

Biff's crossed eyes, which parody Mr. Birnbaum's eyes, are part of a palimpsest of related images and concepts. Without Biff's realizing it, his eyes allude to the remark that The Woman made to Willy just before his arrival: “You are the saddest, self-centerest soul I ever did see-saw …” (116). The word “see-saw” presages Biff's seeing and realizing Willy's having betrayed him and Linda. “See-saw,” which joins past and present tenses of “to see,” also alludes to Willy's disordered experience of time after Biff breaks the bond of their relationship. Moreover, as the image of a child's toy, a see-saw mockingly contrasts Willy's actual position with his dream of divine success. Contrary to ordinary expectations, Willy holds the same job at the end of his career as he did at the beginning of it—working on commission. The movement of the see-saw—its ups and downs in place—contrasts Howard Wagner's rise in the business world with Willy's stasis. At the age of 36, the transposition of Willy's age and the number of years that Willy worked for the Wagners (56), Howard is the head of the company and Willy's superior. Finally, Howard's position contrasts his father Frank's success with Willy's failure. Frank passed on his company to Howard, but Willy has nothing to give his sons.

The math problem, the “thquare root of thixthy twee,” is a coded message which reveals Willy's insanity and Biff's participation in it, but they do not recognize its significance. The number “63,” Willy's age, identifies him as the focus of the problem. The word “square,” an image of an enclosed area, and “root,” a plant image, refer to Willy's paradisiacal garden, the two trees representing Biff and Happy which grew there, and the condition of his mind which is imprisoned in insanity, the root of his and his family's problem. Ironically, when Biff concludes his imitation by saying that Birnbaum walked in, drawn by Willy and Biff's laughter, The Woman, whose entrance parallels Mr. Birnbaum's, leaves the bathroom, her hiding place, and enters Willy's room. Biff's eyes are no longer “crossed” and he finally sees who Willy is.

Stocking imagery further unites Willy, The Woman/Miss Francis, and Linda and Biff in a cycle of betrayal and its recognition. Stockings refer to the nylons Willy gives to Miss Francis, the stock that he sells as a salesman, his status with Biff, and the Loman familial line. During one of Willy's hallucinations, Linda “darns stockings” (36) prior to The Woman's appearance and “mends a pair of her silk stockings” (39) just after her disappearance. When Willy sees Linda at her work, his reaction is intense, for her stockings recall his adultery: “I won't have you mending stockings in this house! Now throw them out! (39). Willy gives stockings to The Woman in exchange for her favors. “And thanks for the stockings, she says to him. “I love a lot of stockings” (39). When Biff surprises Willy and The Woman in his hotel room, she insists on her gift even while Willy desperately tries to get rid of her: “You had two boxes of size nine sheers for me, and I want them!” (119). Betrayers and the betrayed come together in a “stocking” image when Biff poignantly recognizes Willy's adultery and rejects him: “You—you gave her Mama's stockings!” (121).

“Sheers,” the word that Miss Francis uses to refer to silk stockings, also is a pun for “scissors” and suggests cutting, which in turn alludes to Biff's metaphorically cutting the tie that has bound him to Willy. After Biff arrives at home, he burns his sneakers on which he had printed “University of Virginia” (33-34), an act which echoes Willy's utterance of disaster. The act also alludes to the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden for it symbolizes Biff's change from innocence to knowledge, his rejection of Willy's beliefs, and his departure from Willy's paradise. Seventeen years later, at Frank's Chop House, Biff “takes the rolled up hose from his pocket …” (115) and shows it to Happy. Another synonym for stocking, the hose is the means by which Willy planned to commit suicide.

Biff's attempt to get the loan from Oliver has not resulted in the recreation of the Loman's mutually reflective relationship, but in Biff's freedom from Willy's domination and movement to psychological health. Earlier images which Willy used to express his vision of Biff's omnipotence—his name's sounding like a bell and opening all doors to him (86)—are echoed in Biff's unwilled insight and ironically compare the experience to the mysteriousness of divine intervention. After Oliver refuses to talk with him, Biff psychologically awakens as if he hears the sound of a bell. For no explainable reason, Biff suddenly realizes the value of his ordinary human life and accepts his identity or name which opens the door to the possibility of his living normally in chronological time.

As a result of Biff's revelation, he and Willy engage in an agon at the Chop House. Biff tries to make Willy see and accept him as an individual, but Willy struggles to return Biff to his former identity as his alter ego. At this point, Willy vacillates between reality and the hallucination of the past when Biff knocked at the door of Willy's hotel room in Boston. In reality, at the restaurant Biff makes a joke of the blow Willy dealt him and offers him acceptance and forgiveness, an act which would have been impossible for him before his revelation. However, Willy, who is about to accept Biff's invitation, turns away from his and responds to The Woman, who pulls him back into the hallucination and asks him to open the hotel room door. An image of guilt and forgiveness, imprisonment and release, the door suggests Willy's betrayal of Linda and Biff and Biff's psychological release from him and his forgiving him. The washroom in Frank's Chop House, which is conflated with the bathroom where the Woman hid, also evokes Linda's washing clothes (33, 47, 85) and her forgiving Willy.

However, Linda's selfless devotion and Biff's filial love are not strong enough to free Willy from his neurosis. Willy does not relinquish his insane dream even after Biff begs him to give it up. Willy imagines that his death will be the means of his and Biff's long-awaited apotheosis as business gods like Ben and Dave Singleman.

Willy's last utterances refer or allude to images of his and Biff's deification and to his own insanity. With great enthusiasm, he asks Ben, “Can you imagine that magnificence [Biff] with twenty thousand dollars in his pocket?” (135). Willy's reference to his life insurance policy echoes Charley's description of J. P. Morgan: “Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he'd look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well-liked” (97). Willy carries out his plan to literally put money into Biff's pockets in the demented belief that he will become the equivalent of his gods, businessmen like J. P. Morgan.

Willy completes his vision of the future by translating Biff's love to worship, thus achieving divinity like Dave's in Biff's eyes, and by identifying with Biff whom he believes will become as successful as Ben: “[H]e'll worship me for it!. … Oh Ben, I always knew one way or another we were gonna make it, Biff and I!” (135). Finally, Willy sees himself as becoming the embodiment of all success and all time—the eternal in death and the dynamic with Biff in life.

In summary, the imagery which we have discussed, while not exhaustive, exemplifies Miller's poetic use of demotic language. Through his system of associated meanings and dual temporal schemes, Miller infuse the commonplace with tragic significance which mirrors Willy's madness and fate.

Works Cited

Boruch, Marianne. “Miller and Things.” Literary Review 24.4 (1981): 548-61

Gassner, John. “Death of a Salesman: First Impressions, 1949.” In Weales. 231-39.

Gordon, Lois. “Death of a Salesman: An Appreciation.” In Koon. 98-108.

Harshbarger, Karl. The Burning Jungle: An Analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America, 1979.

Koon, Helene, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1949.

Mitchell, Giles. “Living and Dying for the Ideal: A Study of Willy Loman's Narcissism.” The Psychoanalytic Review 77:3 (Fall 1990): 391-407.

Oberg, Arthur. “Death of a Salesman and Arthur Miller's Search for Style.” In Weales. 70-78.

Weales, Gerald, ed. Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin Books, 1967.

Worsley, T. C. “Poetry without Words.” In Weales. 224-27.