don't have to work hard to get ahead, only be personable. Biff has also suffered greatly from the disillusion he experienced when he found out in high school that Willy, his idol, was cheating on Linda.

A case could be made that Biff suffers more. He is encouraged rather than corrected when he steals as a young person, and for a long time he buys into his father's fantasies that he is bigger, better, and more important than he really is. Unlike Linda, who could have taken the children and left, Biff is given no foundation from which to counter his father until it is almost too late.

Linda, however, suffers more because she is never able to free herself from Willy and stop loving him. She enables him when she might have been better off confronting him. Biff, at least, is finally able to face reality when he says, "We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house." He has a chance, with this father's death, to strike out on a new path, one more firmly based in the limitations of the real world. Linda, in the end, has nothing.

Undoubtedly, the person who suffers the most from Willy's delusions is his wife Linda. Although this may be an arguable observation, the evidence in the novel points at this being quite probable.

The character of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a sixty year old man who has achieved very little in life because he has embarked in a never-ending quest to hit his version of the American Dream: One which can be obtained quickly and painlessly if only one is well-liked and good looking.

Living under that philosophy, Willy has brought more grief than joy into his household: He has raised two sons under his "spell", turning them into immature womanizers. He also has cheated on his wife in the quest of being "well-liked" and "popular", and he has brought  little earnings to their finances. After all, Willy has done nothing but to live off his "dreams" of making it big, which are wrong from the beginning.

With time, Willy's illusions have turned into delusions. Literally. Now in his twilight years, Willy has come to the realization that his life has really amounted to nothing. His way of solving his "unfinished businesses" is by reverting back to time in his tired and foolish imagination, where he has the chance to make amends with his past. All these dynamics, from the beginning until now, are witnessed by Linda on a daily basis. Linda, who always remains in the back of the plot, stays quiet, and perhaps even suffers in silence.

Already in Act I we can perceive the pressure that Linda endures living with a man as unreliable as Willy. In this Act, Willy comes to Linda with the news that he has crashed his car again. This is one of several instances that Linda knows of in which Willy has crashed his car. He has tried it before, and he has also tried other forms of what is later known to be suicidal attempts.

Not alone with that, Linda is the bearer of the choices that Willy makes: During her entire marriage she has spent most of the time in her home alone as Willy travels around in foolish sales trips that always come to nothing. Poor Linda Loman plays no role in her family, but she gets to tolerate every bit of her family's dysfunctional nature.

However, Linda does not seem to complaint. If anything, she defends Willy and even goes as far as challenging her own sons to be better to him. According to Linda, Willy is just "lost" and needs to be grounded. She also feels that he needs compassion and understanding.

Yet, when Willy finally succeeds in completing his suicide, Linda still does not understand what is wrong in the first place. She understands the nature of Willy's pain and the fact that he really has a dream that he had wanted to get. Yet, here is Linda being left alone by Willy one more time after his suicide. She simply never gets much back.

Therefore, Linda is Willy's only support system, but she is also the one person who gives him her all without asking for much back. For this reason, she is the silent sufferer who witnesses how her husband breaks down for good.

At the end of the play, Willy is deeply influenced by his son Biff to commit suicide. He loves Biff dearly and wants him to be financially successful in the way he himself has never been. Therefore, having no money, he gives Biff his life so that Biff can collect Willy's insurance money. (To be perfectly clear, Biff in no way wants his father to do this: this all comes out of Willy's ideas of the good life for his child.)

Normally, we think of people being influenced by older mentors, as Willy is by his brother and Dave Singleman, people who, at least in his fantasies, achieved financial success with ease and were able to sit back and watch the money roll in.

Willy wants to pass this idea of easy money onto his sons, especially football star Biff. Would Willy have followed his true, more modest vocation of gardening if he were not influenced by having sons to impress with a more flamboyant kind of financial success—a success he never can achieve?

Of course, Willy does nothing but destroy his sons' lives by trying to model for them a false idea of what success is. Even at the end, when he is influenced by his love for Biff to kill himself, it seems his values are in the wrong place. Again, it is all money that matters and money that he thinks will solve his son's problems, whereas they are probably beyond what money can buy.

Willy Loman's deceased brother, Ben, has an enormous impact on his personality, mindset, and perspective of the world. Willy continually hallucinates and has conversations with Ben at various moments in the play. Willy admires his brother and is fascinated by Ben's success story. Ben's luck dramatically alters Willy's perception of the American Dream, and he regrets not following his brother to Alaska. Willy continually compares himself to Ben and clearly lives in his brother's shadow. Ben's influence negatively affects Willy's ability to grasp the importance of dedication, hard work, and focus, which are necessary traits one must possess in order to attain financial success. Willy fails to recognize that Ben's financial success was founded solely on luck and admires him for all the wrong reasons.

Willy also mentions that he is greatly influenced by a successful salesman named Dave Singleman. After witnessing how Dave Singleman was able to conduct business as an eighty-four-year-old man and earn the respect of his peers, Willy is influenced to follow his footsteps and become a salesman. Willy also misinterprets Dave's path to success and unfortunately subscribes to the wrong dream.

All of us are influenced by other people, often called "important others" by psychologists. These generally include a mother, father, sibling, best friend, spouse, and perhaps one or two lovers. Arthur Miller incorporates all the important others in Willy's life in his older brother Ben. This is for the sake of practical necessity. Miller did not want to go into Willy's entire biography. But the audience must think it a little strange that Ben should have played such an important role in Willy's life and nobody else had any apparent influence--not even Linda, Willy's wife. So Miller probably invented the story about Dave Singleman to suggest that there were other influential people in Willy's long lifetime besides Ben. Willy would have met hundreds and hundreds of people during the years he worked as a traveling salesman, and he seems like a man who is easily influenced. There must have been others who made a strong impression on him. Singleman may have been intended to stand in for all those latter-day acquaintances whom Miller could not cast in his drama. Most of us, when we summon up remembrance of things past, will recall a number of people who shaped our thinking and the paths we took in life. Willy couldn't have been much different from the rest of us.