He sees his job at the shoe factory, and even the shoes themselves, as useless, saying his future has nothing to do with shoes, “except as something to wear on a traveler’s feet” (1660). Tom drinks himself away, writes and gets lost in poetry, and spends hours and hours at the movies searching for adventure: he sees these escapes as “compensation for lives that passed like, without any change or adventure” (1648). The pressure Amanda feels from having to take care of Laura and over her not having any gentlemen callers makes matters even worse for Tom.īiff and Tom both try to escape from their hated lives and positions in some way.

Laura, however unintentionally, creates tension for Tom by needing the care he provides. They also both have siblings that, in a way, facilitate their escape and their bad parent-child relationships Happy likes taking advantage of the fact that he’s now Willy’s favorite, the “successful” one, and uses every chance to create tension between Biff and Willy. Willy has his flashbacks and refuses to believe that Biff has lost out on his dream of prosperity all Amanda wants is for Laura to have a gentleman caller, but instead of helping or making her feel comfortable with the lack of them, she just goes on and on about how she “received- seventeen! – gentlemen callers!” (1632). Both parents are so crippled by their obsession with the past that they are unable to actually help their children. Amanda goes even further back to her youth, when she was courting and focuses on how she could have done so much better than Tom and Laura’s father. Both Willy and Amanda are incapable of letting go of their past: Willy focuses on when Biff and Happy were growing up, before his relationship with them became so damaged at the same time, he refuses to acknowledge this relationship with the past – “I’m not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind.” (1346). Biff and Tom represent those who, in this period of time, began the shift from urban living to suburban living, and also the beginning of alternative American Dreams.īiff and Tom are both trapped by the responsibility they feel towards their helpless parents. The reader is eventually able to connect Biff and Tom as being more alike than more different.

They both search for escapes from their miserable lives, often in the form of adventure, whether their own or vicariously. Biff and Tom both resent the lives they feel trapped in, as though they were forced on them in the form of familial responsibility while Biff blames Willy, Tom blames Amanda. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee William’s Glass Menagerie, readers see two characters who share a struggle to let go of their pasts.

Death of a salesman quotes