Willy Loman's Impact on his Own World : A Lacanian Analysis of a Life Lived in Incongruence

Abstract: 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.