and present, and this, again, because in his desperation to justify his life Willy Loman has destroyed the boundaries between now and then (Hayman 38). Willy sometimes brings his illusions to the present, especially when he calls upon his dead brother, Ben.Perhaps the chief virtue of the play is the attention that Miller makes us pay to [Willy] and his problem, for the man represents the lower middle class, the fifty-dollars-a-week-plus-commission citizen, whose dream is to live to a ripe old age doing a great volume of business over the telephone. (Clurman, Drama 308)A major theme of the play illustrates the lost opportunities that Willy faces. Even Willys last name, Loman, suggests that Willy is a low man on the totem pole (Hayman 38). The Wagner Company has recently stopped Willys salary and pays him only commission on the sales he makes, as if he were a beginner. Willy is eventually fired from the Wagners Company after thirty-six years as a traveling salesman. He feels that the death of Frank Wagner, Willys previous boss, has caused Willy to lose respect and power as a salesman.Willys plight is shown to be at least partly the result of his own character; he fails not only because of the pressure of the competitive system, but also because of his incorrigible inability to tell the truth even to himself, his emotional, nonlogical mode of thought, which allows him flatly to contradict himself, and of which schizophrenia is merely an intensification (Parker 33)Throughout the play, Miller foreshadows many significant plot developments. Willy worries about his trouble driving. On one of his trips, Willy gets as far as Yonkers, where he has to turn around. Willy tells his wife, Linda, that he was driving along looking at the scenery and suddenly was going off the road. It took Willy four hours to return home from Yonkers because he could only drive ten miles an hour. He also expresses dissatisfaction about his current job as a tr...
