Throughout Death of a Salesman, Arthur Millers 1949 Pulitzer Prize winning play, Willy Loman, the tragic title character, has been unable--due to his many personal shortcomings--to rise to an executive position with his longtime employer, the Wagner Company: "If old man Wagner was alive I'd be in charge of New York now! That man was a prince, he was a masterful man. But that boy of his, that Howard, he don't appreciate" (Miller 14). Thus thwarted in his dream of becoming "a captain of industry" (Porter 29), Willy begins to fade in and out of pleasant memories from the past in order to escape the present and avoid thinking about what promises to be a gloomy future. This is because after a lifetime of effort, his own attempts at discovering "the mystery of success, the Eleusinian rite known only to initiates" (30), have all proven futile. And so the aging salesman, recently demoted to "straight commission, like a beginner, an unknown" (Miller 57), seeks to fulfill his corporate ambitions through his two stunningly handsome sons, Biff and Happy Loman, hoping for reflected glory via their business achievements.

From the opening lines of this celebrated tragedy "of die common man" (Benet 684), the garrulous Willy--"I can't stop myself--I talk too much" (Miller 37)--shows a weakness for inflated language and grand similes. One of his favorite ways to boast of the promise of his two boys is to compare them with men of great wealth and accomplishment. For example, he references four American overachievers early on in the play: Gene Tunney and Red Grange from the world of professional sports, then from the business arena, Thomas Edison and B. F. Goodrich. However, these four icons of achievement are mere mortals, and thus they provide inadequate role models for the godlike Loman brothers. As a result, to do proper justice to the charms of his matinee-idol sons, Willy leaves the real world behind and twice gleans the pages of Greek mythology for more appropriate icons of masculine accomplishment. But the famous Greek duo he evokes for his "desperate attempt to confirm and maintain self-esteem" (Ribkoff 50) are both flawed characters, physically superior men in every way, but sorely lacking in the deeper qualities, such as intelligence, maturity, and self-discipline.

Arthur Miller was a student of Greek literature and its archetypal patterns going back to his days at the University of Michigan where he began writing plays as a freshman and earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1938. His many works of fiction during a career that lasted almost seventy years--novels, plays, and short stories--are justly revered for their ironic and multilayered meanings. That well documented fondness for resonance, subtext, and analogy certainly holds true in Death of a Salesman, a work that is often compared favorably to Greek tragedy. Although Willy Loman frequently denigrates academic learning-"A man who can't handle tools is not a man" (44)--Miller gives him some knowledge of western literature and a few of its primal stories and themes....