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The System

and the American Dream

*DEATH OF A SALESMAN*

page3..Craig M. Garrison

In addition, Happy, the youngest son, never realizes his father's fallacy of "be well liked and you shall never want". Happy tried to make it in the city with a similar sales career like his father. He also lives a lie in the fact he claims to have a certain position with his company when in reality he is in the lower bracket of the company. Happy is not able to see himself for what he is, unlike his brother, who finally has an epiphany of who he is and what he stands for.

In agreement, Lois Gordon remarks, "Hap, less favored by nature and his father, perhaps as Willy was in comparison with Ben, has escaped the closeness with his father that destroys Biff in social terms. Thus worshipping his father from afar, Hap has never fully come to realize that phony part of his father and his father's dreams. He does have longings to be outdoors and to get away from the crippling fifty-weeks-of-work-a-year routine, but because he has never seen his father's feet of clay, he has more fully than Biff accepted his father's dreams. He is not a social rebel, and he will carry on with the life of a salesman, and, one suspects, go on to the death of a salesman. He will violate the boss' wife out of some lonely desperation, as Willy sought support and solace in his Boston woman. He will also prove his manliness with fast cars and fancy talk, but again like Willy, he will never really believe in his own manliness in any mature way. Just as Willy is called a kid throughout, and referred to as the diminutive Willy be everyone except Benn….Happy has been trapped by the infantile American Playboy magazine vision of the male" (Gordon p.324).

In contrast, Ben has become extremely successful in life compared to his brother Willy. Ben is the only member of the Loman family to achieve greatness. He is the example of the true entrepreneur in every sense, "Never fight fair with a stranger" was Ben's wisdom and his faith—"When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich!" Although, this information was never enough for a blueprint for Willy to follow, Willy always sought his brother Ben's advice to reach the pot of gold under the rainbow

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