In Death of a Salesman, 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.¹ 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. Miller's system of onomastic and numerical images and echoes forms a complex network which delineates Willy's insanity and its effects on his family and job.

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, which he identifies with the time in which Biff and Happy were growing up in Brooklyn, was also synonymous with his and his sons' exclusive society in which they expressed, reflected, and validated his belief in their virtual divinity. Expressing his enthusiasm for Biff's divine condition, Willy ironically incorporated the concept of progress, 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. Before Biff realized Willy's projected future, however, 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 created by a confusion of the present and of its fragmented paradise.

Willy never experiences the future which is part of normal chronological time because he recognizes only the future which he believes is latent in his paradise. To his destruction, he seeks to actualize it.

Willy Loman reconstructs the past “not chronologically as in flashback, but dynamically with the inner logic of his erupting volcanic unconscious” (Schneider 252.) This “visualized psychoanalytic interpretation woven into reality” (Schneider 253) serves as Miller's principal dramatic method—the simultaneous existence of the past and present in Willy's disordered mind. Miller has said that he was obsessed with “a mode that would open a man's head for a play to take place inside it, evolving through concurrent rather than consecutive actions,” which “turned him [Willy] to see present through past and past through present, a form that … would be … a collecting point for all that his … society had poured into him” (Timebends 129, 131).

The most difficult aspect of the play is the nature of the scenes, seemingly from the past, which are reconstructed by Willy's disordered mind. It is hard to determine whether Willy is hallucinating or actually recalling a past event. Although it may be impossible to resolve this problem, it is possible to determine the psychological associative processes which dictate why and how Willy experiences these events.

Willy is a salesman who values names, of people, places, and products, and numbers, of salaries and commissions, as the coinage of his personal, commercial, and psychological worlds. Miller uses these names, even letters, and numbers to create a network of associations which establish a surrealistic pattern of insistent mockery and fatalism repeated in different but related contexts. As a result, the play becomes “a sort of narrative poem”:

Images—car, road, refrigerator, valises, silk stockings, a woman's laughter—through their rhythmic reappearance in the past and present, in different contexts, grow into symbols of his entire life. … The imagery is drawn from the hard cold facts of the life … Willy Loman, the salesman for the Wagner Company, who lives in a house in Brooklyn. It grows in meaning by association and juxtaposition to metaphorical significance.

(Gordon 98, 107-08)

But this narrative poem is an expressionistic nightmare. The repetition of the names and numbers produce an echo chamber of mockery indicative of Willy's failure to achieve his dreams. He is like a rat in a maze; no matter where he turns he runs into the same indices of defeat. This is a deterministic universe, one that parallels the world of Greek tragedy. Willy can not escape the fate which he in a sense has created through the demented dreams instilled in him by his perversion of the American dream of success (Messenger 199).

Miller suggests that the power of the psyche is comparable to the fate represented by the omnipotent and capricious gods of Greek tragedy. For no apparent reason, Willy's psyche blinds him to the madness of his grandiose dreams of omnipotence and compels him to attempt to replace reality with his own concept of it.² In other terms, it drives him to challenge the gods. His delusory fulfillment of his grandiose dreams and the punishment for his hubris come together in his act of suicide. Happy, who is obsessed by sexuality, is a base variation of Willy and a mocking comment on his insane aspirations and death. Characterized by duality and duplicity, Happy lives in unending alternations of assertion and contradiction which result in nothingness. In contrast, Biff's psyche or fate mercifully releases him from Willy's dreams and their effects into the ordered multiplicity and movement of normal life. Biff's good fortune, however, does not explain or justify Willy's tragedy and Happy's meaninglessness. In the face of the incomprehensible and uncontrollable power of the psyche, modern audiences are moved to pity and terror as ancient audiences were moved by the fall of these heroes in Greek tragedy.

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 want to know, and I go right through” (33).³ Elaborating on name imagery that echoes his own 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).

But in reality, name imagery reveals Willy and Biff's failures. 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 Filene'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 further points to Biff's failure to develop a career. When he attempted to meet with Bill Oliver, a businessman, he waited in his reception room, and “[k]ept sending my name in” (104), but it meant nothing to Oliver, and his door remained closed. In sum, when announcing a name, ringing a bell, and opening a door constitute the dramatic action, these actions contrast Willy's belief in his omnipotence with his base reality. 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.

The names that appear throughout Death of a Salesman can be grouped into three related categories: geographical, personal, and business, the most significant of which often begin with “B,” “F,” and “S.” The geographical names consist primarily of the places Willy travels to as a salesman; the personal include his family, friends, and business associates. Finally, the business category is comprised of the names of the people, stores, and products Willy reveres and intones throughout the play as proof of his value and the signs of the success he envisions for his sons.

Willy uses the names of the places on his business route as images of geographical and temporal expansion to enhance his relationship with his sons. In his description of a business trip, Willy evokes and identifies with the grandeur of New England and its history. The names of the cities along his route, a metaphor for the course of his life, however, are not indicative of his professional success but of the pain that Willy, Biff, and Happy suffer after their inflated emotions collapse.⁴ 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, Providence foreshadows and initiates the malign fate which pursues him, as the names of the other places on his route suggest. Waterbury, a “[b]ig clock city” (31), is an image which mocks the Lomans 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). Boston “the cradle of the Revolution” (31), alludes to Biff's disillusionment with Willy and separation from him after having found him in a Boston hotel in an adulterous relationship.⁵ Portland is the city Willy is unable to reach because of his mental breakdown. Metaphorically, Portland suggests Willy's failure to achieve the “port” or fulfillment which 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 “because 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.

Time, William, time! …
BEN:
(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 (31), onomatopoetically explodes—“bang!”—recalling imagery of emotional inflation and collapse associated with Willy's dreams. On the one hand, images of cohesion and of expansion respectively reflect the past mutual admiration between him and his sons and Willy's emotional inflation that results from it. Stage directions and rhythmic dialogue bring Willy, Biff, and Happy together like three vaudevillians, as Willy indulges his visions of himself as a master salesman basking in his son's admirations. Willy's mood expands as he tells Biff and Happy about his business trip and promises to take them with him on his next one.

WILLY:
This summer, heh?
BIFF and Happy:
(together) Yeah! You bet.
WILLY:
We'll take our bathing suits.
HAPPY:
We'll carry your bags, Pop!
WILLY:
Oh, won't that be something! Me comin' into the Boston stores with you boys carrying my bags, what a sensation!

(31)

The repetitions of accented “b's” in the words bet, Boston, boys, and bags unify, energize, and inflate the three Lomans. Willy's vision of Biff and Happy's carrying his bags symbolizes his unity with his sons and their mutual admiration.

But years after Biff became disillusioned with Willy, he uses imagery of vain 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. In the light of the Lomans' lack of success, the bags, suggestive of wind-bags, allude to the burden of Willy's meretricious beliefs and unfounded grandiosity that Biff and Happy bore.

The image of inflated emotion and explosion inherent in Bangor is cruelly echoed in the word blow, which can mean “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, Willy's former benevolent boss, and chop, which 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. “Biff came to me this morning, Willy, and he said, ‘Tell Dad, we want to blow him to a big meal.’ Be there [at Frank's Chop House] at six o'clock, you and your two boys are going to have dinner” (74)⁶. At the restaurant, Biff, who has stolen Bill Oliver's pen and escaped from his office in disgrace, tries to make Willy face the reality of their respective failures. Deeply angered, Willy strikes Biff, a blow which precipitates his subsequent hallucination in which Biff knocks on—or strikes—the door of Willy's hotel room in Boston, initiating the series of events that resulted in Biff's disillusionment.

Willy measures people's worth by their “names”—their popularity and reputation—and by the money they earn and amass. He cherishes and intones sacred names like Dave Singleman, Ben Loman, Bill Oliver, and Frank Wagner, among others, who “represent aspects of his splintered mind” (Hoeveler 632).

Names beginning with “B” are used to present taunting images of success and failure. Ben, Willy's successful brother, walked into the jungle at seventeen and emerged at twenty-one a wealthy man. Bill Oliver, Biff's past employer and present delusory hope, has a first name which alludes to his monetary success, but he does not lend the money to Biff for his hopeless athletic scheme. Moreover, by its closeness to Biff and its equation with Willy, Bill mocks their respective failure. Similarly, Willy's reference to B. F. Goodrich, the founder and namesake of a tire manufacturing company, as a businessman who succeeded later in life also ironically alludes to Biff (18). The initials, “B. F.,” sound like “Biff,” and the last name describes the financial condition that Willy wants for him. In addition, Bernard, Charley's son, has achieved the success that Willy predicted he would never have because he was not well-linked, unlike Biff who was the popular football hero destined for fame and fortune. Willy Loman, the lowman on the economic totem pole, is tormented by the success of Ben, Bernard, and Bill Oliver and by the failure of Biff, which began with his son's flunking math seventeen years ago.

When Biff went to Boston to ask Willy to talk to his math teacher Birnbaum about raising his grade, he saw Willy with The Woman and lost faith in Willy and himself. As Harshbarger has noted, the first syllable in “Birnbaum” is reminiscent of fire and 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 his growing sense of dread, just before he tells Biff and Happy that he was fired. In the context of the events at the Boston hotel, Birnbaum's name is a double pun. 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.

The next important letter is “F,” found primarily in the names of people, usually Frank or a derivative, which convey a conflict between benevolence and protection on the one hand, and dismissal and degradation on the other. The principal benevolent Frank is Frank Wagner, Willy's former employer, who in 1928, according to Willy, made promises to him which his son Howard, whom Willy says he helped name (97), has failed to honor. Other benevolent characters named Frank are Biff's teenaged friend who, under Biff's direction, helps with household chores (34), and the repairman Frank, whom Willy depends upon to repair the cherished Chevrolet (36). At the opposite pole is Miss Francis, Willy's Boston mistress. Finally, there is Frank's Chop House where Willy relives the Boston episode and Happy ignores his father's distress to leave with Miss Forsythe, the “chippy” who parallels Miss Francis.

The third important letter is “S,” which appears in the names of important salespeople cut, and in related stores, places, brand names, objects, and qualities which represent concomitantly Willy's dreams of success and his guilt in not fulfilling them cut. Dave Singleman is the eighty-four-year-old salesman who conducted his successful business activities wearing his green velvet slippers, which symbolize the easy success of the David-like single man who conquered the business world (81). The store and place names beginning with “S” include J. H. Simmons, the company for which Miss Francis was the buyer, and the Standish Arms (111), the hotel where Biff witnessed the primal scene of patriarchal betrayal. Also, there are the aspects of Willy's profession, the “smile and a shoeshine” (“Requiem” 138) which Charley says a salesman faces the world with.

A key object with “S” is the silk stockings Willy gave to Miss Francis as a kind of payment for sex, which he guiltily recalls every time he sees Linda mending her stockings. As Boruch has explained, “Willy can't get rid of the ghost of silk stockings, symbol of his infidelity, and cause of Biff's distrust” (554). 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!” When Biff surprises Willy and The Woman in his hotel room, she insists on taking 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).

Sheers, the word that Miss Francis uses to refer to silk stockings, when spelled shears means “scissors” and suggests “to cut,” which in turn alludes to Biff's metaphorically cutting the tie that has wrongfully bound him and Willy. He cries out in anguish that Willy has given her “Mama's stockings” (121). After Biff arrives at home, he burns his sneakers on which he had printed “University of Virginia” (94), an act which echoes Willy's utterance of incendiary disaster and symbolizes his change from innocence to knowledge, his rejection of Willy's belief when the “illusion of [Willy's] sexless godhead … is shattered” (Schneider 253). Seventeen years later, at Frank's Chop House, Biff “takes the rolled up hose from his pocket” and shows it to Happy (115). Another synonym for stockings, the hose is the means by which Willy planned to commit suicide.

Parallel to the silk stockings is the letter “S” on Biff's football sweater (28), which represents his special or superman status in Willy's eyes. Biff wears the sweater when he discovers his father's adultery in Boston and its “S” is echoed ironically seventeen years later when Willy encounters the now successful and formerly “anemic” and unpopular Bernard, who is going to argue a case before the Supreme Court. The word Supreme mocks Willy's deluded prediction about Bernard 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).

2

Numbers, which represent specificity and order in mundane reality, also reveal the damage that Willy does to his family to satisfy his neurotic demands. Like the onomastic images, numbers reveal and comment on Willy and Biff's failures. The numbers used in Death of a Salesman denote: 1. diurnal time, the course of a career, and contract stipulations; 2. money, usually in the form of salaries and commissions, earned, sought or expected, and debts; 3. distance, the miles Willy travels in pursuit of his dreams; 4. street designations. The most important numbers are two or doubles, 4, 6, 11, 17, 34, 48, and 63.

Two's or doubles are an important indication of Willy's inescapable malaise. The play has two acts and takes two days, and Willy lives a dual existence in the past and the present. Willy carries two suitcases (12), emblematic of his business world and the burden of his two sons, who are two years apart (19) and are paralleled by Howard's two children, who are also two years apart (77), and Bernard's two sons (92). Willy mentions the two elm trees which used to be in the backyard but were chopped down, a symbol of destruction of his idyllic plans for his sons (17). There are two sets of brothers, Ben and Willy, and Happy and Biff. Further, Willy gives two pairs of silk stockings to Miss Francis, who is paralleled by the two “chippies” the boys pick up at Frank's where Willy expects to celebrate a dual triumph. He feels sure that Howard will give him the non-traveling job that he wants and that Biff will get the loan from Oliver. When Biff orders drinks that evening, “Scotch all around. Make it doubles,” and Stanley, the waiter repeats “doubles,” they unwittingly echo the dual failures of Willy and Biff.

Seventeen, Biff's age when he failed math by four points, echoes and contrasts with Ben's achievement. Ben, Willy's dead brother and his image of the ideal Darwinian businessman, 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 is professionally in the same place, but Bernard has become a lawyer. When Willy congratulates him on his success, he alludes to Biff's four missed points: “I'm overjoyed to see how you made the grade, Bernard overjoyed” (92).

Thirty-four, the double of seventeen, reappears at key moments to mock Willy's pretensions and to signal his tragedy.⁷ Biff lost his desire to succeed at the age of seventeen (92), and now seventeen years later at thirty-four (16), he has returned home to resurrect his life by meeting with Bill Oliver. In anguish after being fired, Willy declares “I put thirty-four years in this firm” (82). Finally, in the “Requiem,” Linda says that she does not know why Willy committed suicide because “this is the first time in thirty-five years” (137) they have been free of debt, and she has “made the last payment on the house” (139), which had a twenty-five year mortgage that began when Biff was nine, (73).

Thirty-six and its reverse sixty-three also haunt Willy and connect directly with the fateful scene in the Boston hotel. Willy is sixty-three years of age (57), and according to Linda has worked at Wagner's for “thirty-six years this March” (56). Nevertheless, Howard, who is thirty-six (76), unceremoniously fires him. Biff's satiric attack on Mr. Birnbaum initiates the baleful consequences of the trip for both Biff and Willy. 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 eves and talked with a lithp … The thquare root of thixthy twee is …” (118).

The math problem, “the thquare root of thixty twee,” is a coded message which alludes to Willy's insanity and Biff and Happy's participation in it; however, Willy and Biff do not see its meaning. The number sixty-three, 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 and 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 problems. Biff concludes his imitation by saying, “in the middle of it [Biff's classroom performance] he [Mr. Birnbaum] walked in!” (118). 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.

The penultimate scene of the second act, which takes place at Frank's Chop House, represents Miller's most effective juxtaposition of the past and the present and the culmination of the onomastic and numerological patterns. Having suffered the dual indignity of being fired by Howard and having to borrow money from Charley, Willy eagerly anticipates meeting his sons at Frank's (six letters) Chop House on 48th Street and 6th Avenue at 6 o'clock. These numbers are portentous. Forty-eight is the reverse of the revered Dave Singleman's age at which he was still successful (81). The number may also refer to the two-day duration of the play at the end of which Willy commits suicide. Six is also a deadly number, recalling the standard 6′×6′ size of graves. Further, Biff failed math, scoring only a “61,” in June, the sixth month (93, 118), and when he went to Boston (six letters) he discovered his father's infidelity. Now Willy confronts his broken son Biff, who waited six hours for Oliver (six letters), and, after being ignored, stole his golden pen, as he once had stolen a carton of basketballs from him, and fled down eleven flights of stairs (104)—11＋6=17, the fateful age at which Biff's ambition died and the number of years he has spent wandering aimlessly.

The use of the number eleven also suggests the “11th hour,” and image of Biff's precarious situation poised between destruction—return to his mutually reflective relationship—and salvation—imminent change in his psychological condition. Biff's description of his anger with both Oliver and himself contains an allusion to his past bondage to Willy's sick dreams: “How the hell did I ever get the idea I was a salesman there? … And then he gave me one look and—I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been!” (104). The theft of Bill Oliver's gold fountain pen signals the beginning of Biff's psychological awakening. After he takes the pen, he runs down the eleven flights of stairs, and, in a psychological sense, undoes his past as he descends from inflated dream to fundamental reality: “I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw … the things that I love in this world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. … Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be?” (132). Within the confines of the office building, Biff recognizes and accepts the value of his ordinary life.

Despite his liberating insight, Biff is not able to get Willy to see reality at Frank's Chop House, where a scene of filial denial is enacted which parallels the episode in Boston when Willy denied Biff and Linda in his pursuit of Miss Francis. In a parody of his father's career and values, Happy woos the “strudel” (100) by pretending to be a champagne salesman and by claiming that Biff plays quarterback for the New York Giants, an ironic expansion of Willy's past adulation of him as a stellar high-school quarterback playing the championship game at Ebbets Field. Happy also asserts that his real name is Harold (six letters), which recalls Howard Wagner (six letters each), another son who is disloyal to his father and dismissive of another father. Happy “sells himself” to Miss Forsythe by ordering the champagne just as Willy “scored” with Miss Francis by giving her Linda's silk stockings. Happy denies his father—“that's not my father. He's just a guy” (115)—to go with Miss Forsythe and Letta, names that respectively represent Willy's lack of foresight and his defeat as exemplifies by ominous repetitions.

After his sons leave, Willy ends up hallucinating in the downstairs toilet, which signals his descent into the depths of his madness as he relives the events in Boston when Miss Francis emerged from Willy's bathroom and was seen by Biff. He is helped by the waiter Stanley, whose name recalls the Standish Arms, and he leaves, completely despondent, to search for the fruitless seeds, the image of his faithless sons who have never taken hold in the soil of his own prelapsarian backyard garden, in the hardware store on 6th Avenue, the street of the dead (122).

Miller uses the repeated names, letters, and numbers not only to impart a sense of concrete and specific realism to the dreamlike scenes but also to create an expressionistic juxtaposition of the past and present and desire and guilt in Willy's disordered mind. Everyone can empathize with the tragedy of a little man who persists in trying to gain the elusive success that is all wrong for him and his sons. Willy's dilemma is universal, and Miller's depiction of it is both simple and complex, realistic and surrealistic, and ultimately, sad and nightmarishly fatalistic.

Notes

1. For a discussion of the various ways Arthur Miller uses demotic language, see my article “Miller's Poetic Use of Demotic English in Death of a Salesman,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 17 (1988): 120-28.

2. For an excellent discussion of the nature of Willy's madness, see Giles Mitchell, “Living and Dying for the Ideal: A Study of Willy Loman's Narcissism.” The Psychoanalytic Review 77 (1990): 391-407.

3. All citations of the play will be from Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949; rpt. Penguin, 1976).

4. Willy uses the cliches of business success to describe to his sons how much he sold in New England—“Knocked 'em cold in Providence, slaughtered 'em in Boston” (33)—but the language conveys the deadly emptiness of his dreams.

5. Boston is also the place from which Ben says their father began his cross country journeys with the family to sell his successful gadgets (49).

6. Tuesday, the day on which dinner takes place (71), may also contain an ironic pun on the number two.

7. Thirty-four is a key number in Miller's life. As he explains in Timebends, he became an overnight success at the age of thirty-four in 1949 with the production and publication of Death of a Salesman (184).

Works Cited

Ardolino, Frank. “Miller's Poetic Use of Demotic English in Death of a Salesman.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 17 (1988): 120-28.

Boruch, Marianne. “Miller and Things.” Literary Review 24 (1981): 548-61.

Gordon, Lois. “Death of a Salesman: An Appreciation.” In Twentieth Century Interpretations of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, ed. Helene Koon. Princeton University Press, 1983. 98-108.

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

Hoeveler, Diane. “Death of a Salesman as Psychomachia.” Journal of American Culture 1 (1978): 632-37.

Messenger, Christian. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. 1949; rpt. N.Y.: Penguin, 1976.

———. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987.

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

Schneider, Daniel. “Play of Dreams.” in Death of a Salesman: Text and Criticism, ed. Gerald Weales. New York: Penguin, 1967. 250-58.