Revised Open Prompt #2

2007. In many works of literature, past events can affect, positively or negatively, the present activities, attitudes, or values of a character. Choose a novel or play in which a character must contend with some aspect of the past, either personal or societal. Then write an essay in which you show how the character's relationship to the past contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.

 

No matter how hard we try, the past is unchangable. The past shapes who we are in the present. In Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Biff is forced to deal with his past experiences with his father, Willy. His struggle with some aspects of his past shows how empty society can turn people, and how they are futile in the pursuit of success.

Throughout the play, Biff often refers to Willy's affair. When Biff walks into the hotel room and sees his father cheating on his mother, his loses his faith in his father and is forever haunted by the experience. His struggle with once sympathetic his feelings for his father shows how in the end, your personality and how well liked you are do not matter. It shows that in our modern world, success is not brought depending on a person's personality, potential, or even contacts. To Biff, Willy was a well respected, well liked father, until he caught him cheating on Linda. As soon as Biff saw how Will wasn't really the great man he thought he was, he becomes hostile towards him. He begins to see the fallacy and futility in impressionability and realizes that talk is cheap, and that success can only be brought by hard work and the initiative to take action. This is the main reason why Biff is the only character in the play who is able to recognize this problem with Willy's personality.

Another aspect of Biff's past that seems to affect his present life is the fact that Willy was always exaggerating him up to be something the he was not. His father's false pride and overly extravagant confidence leads to Biff always feeling superior or entitled to high praise by others. When he was young, he tries to get by on his charm and strong presence, not by relying on hard work. Biff's inability to be successful throughout the play shows how personality and charm are worthless in the all business-like empty world that he lives in, where only results matter. His friend Bernard exemplifies this contrast between hard work and relying on relationships. Bernard ends up being highly successful as a lawyor capable of arguing in front of the Supreme Court, while Biff hardly makes a living doing hard labor out west. 

Plays often seek to capture the attitudes and traditions of their time and convey them to audiences. They also illustrate errors and flaws a society might have by exaggerating them in the play. Miller does just that in Death of a Salesman by frequently using past events in the plot to illustrate the idea that our society is changing from warm and like-able, to cold and business-like.