As is evident from the title of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), the protagonist of the play, the salesman Willy Loman, will die. This essay will investigate what role Ben, Willy’s deceased brother, plays in Willy’s suicide. The thesis is that Willy needs Ben’s support in order to commit suicide and therefore needs to bring Ben’s values, at the possible expense of his wife Linda’s, into his superego. Ben is, to Willy, a true example of the American Dream, as he was a very successful businessman. Willy’s ego (or rational mind) seems to realize that his superego (or conscience) needs to replace the humane values of Linda with the economic values of Ben, in order to justify his motivation of an “economically beneficial” suicide. When Willy arrives at his final conclusion of how his favorite son Biff would financially benefit from his “accidental” suicide and thereby being able to attain Willy’s version of the American Dream, the evidence brought forth may suggest that Willy, at that point, allows Ben full access into his mind.        Willy’s mind will be investigated via Freud’s triple model of the psyche; the id, the ego and the superego.

This essay will analyze the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s, Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, from a psychoanalytical perspective. The purpose is to establish the reason for his suicide. The thesis is that Willy Loman seems to have developed a narcissistic and borderline personality disorder and as a consequence his mentality was affected and that led him to commit suicide. Willy Loman is a self-centered man who has an obsession with success both as a salesman but also as a husband and a father, in such a way that his mental health is questioned. This suggests that his final decision to commit suicide has been affected by some type of mental disorder that derives from his neuroses. Therefore, Willy Loman’s behavior will be investigated by using Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of neuroses and mental disorders.

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This study is an archetypal literary analysis of Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman and Homer’s The Odyssey. The analysis aims to demonstrate how Arthur Miller’s protagonist, Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman demonstrates several stages of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of the individuation process, similar to Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey. This is done by identifying set archetypes and stages of Jung’s individuation process, the persona, the shadow, the anima, and the self. After that, the stages are applied to both Miller’s play and Homer’s epic poem. The analysis shows that both protagonists demonstrate and complete Jung’s individuation process. Willy Loman completes a symbolic journey, whereas Odysseus completes a physical one.

In the 1949 play The Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller depicts a man that goes through life without ever really understanding his own place in it. Willy Loman spends his life chasing a dream yet lacks the ability to achieve it. Instead of trying to learn about himself, his abilities, and find goals more suited for him, he stubbornly insists on chasing grand and misinterpreted dreams woven by others. He commits his life to fantasies and coerces his family to follow him on a course towards failure and tragedy. This thesis seeks to analyze the behavior of the lead character of the play with the help of the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. The analysis seeks to explain how Willy’s behavior affects the lives of his family members as well as his own, with a focus on the language of the play.