DOAS motifs/symbols/AO2

Question 1

Mythologised figures

Answer 1

• Biff and Happy are compared to ‘Hercules’ and are supposedly both ‘built like a pair of Adonises’.
• Dave Singleman: While he may embody the A.D, he died a lonely death and was still work at age 84. Willy aspires to this heroic status.

Question 2

Alaska, Africa/’the jungle’, American West

Answer 2

• Willy’s father found success in Alaska and his brother, Ben, became rich in Africa; these exotic locales, especially when compared to Willy’s banal Brooklyn neighbourhood, crystallize how Willy’s obsession with the commercial world of the city has trapped him in an unpleasant reality.
• The American West/the ‘outdoors’ represents Biff’s potential. He has a pioneer mindset. This differentiates him from Willy; he understands that success is personal and individualistic.

Question 3

Flute music

Answer 3

• Willy’s father had been a flute salesman. There’s a humility and authenticity to his father’s career in flute-making that Willy’s own career clearly lacks.
• Willy yearns for the success he imagines his father had, and for the wilderness that claimed him. The flute music indicates the existence of another path, one which Willy is unable and in some ways chooses not to take.
• N.B: Willy remembers little of his father; learns from Ben most things

Question 4

Seeds

Answer 4

• Seeds represent for Willy the opportunity to prove the worth of his labour, both as a salesman and a father.
• Lack of succession/dynasty/empire.
• His desperate, nocturnal attempt to grow vegetables signifies his shame about having nothing to leave his children when he passes.
• Willy feels that he has worked hard but fears that he will not be able to help his progeny any more than his own abandoning father helped him.
• Willy’s efforts to cultivate and nurture Biff went awry.

Question 5

Diamonds

Answer 5

• To Willy, diamonds represent tangible wealth and, hence, both validation of one’s labour (and life) and the ability to pass material goods on to one’s offspring, two things that Willy desperately craves.
• At the end of the play, Ben encourages Willy to enter the “jungle” finally and retrieve this elusive diamond—that is, to kill himself for insurance money in order to make his life meaningful.

Question 6

Stockings

Answer 6

• The teenage Biff accuses Willy of giving away Linda’s stockings to The Woman. Stockings assume a metaphorical weight as the symbol of betrayal and sexual infidelity.
• New stockings are important for both Willy’s pride in being financially successful and thus able to provide for his family and for Willy’s ability to ease his guilt about his betrayal.
• He buys the woman new stockings, but then cannot afford to do so for Linda. He says ‘I will not have you mending stockings in this house’.
• The Woman says she loves to have ‘lots of stockings’, when Linda has none. Perhaps she thus represents the system harbouring wealth while others flounder in poverty.

Question 7

What is Charley’s purpose in the Requiem?

Answer 7

His words serve as a kind of respectful eulogy that removes blame from willy as and individual by underlining the gruelling expectations and demands of his profession- solemnly observing that a salesman’s life is a constant unforgiving struggle to sell himself and when buyers stop ‘smiling back’, ‘that’s an earthquake’.

Question 8

Why does Willy remember Biff failing math when Biff is trying to tell him about Oliver?

Answer 8

In both instances, Willy believes Biff has failed to spite him. He evades blame for Biff’s failings.
- The transition: Biff ‘continues unheard as light fades’