This realization prompts an entire overhaul of the values taught to him by his father, and Biff wants to expose the lies Willy has been telling for years.
He is happy only when he is honest with himself. Now Biff has come home and he realizes that he's just an ordinary guy who was meant for a life outside the business world. Integrity was never an emphasized characteristic in the Loman house. Willy even encouraged his boys to steal: another reason Biff couldn't hold a job, because he kept getting in trouble for stealing. Willy encouraged him only to be well liked and popular Biff learned he never had to work for anything or take orders from anyone, and as a result, he couldn't keep a job in the business world. Biff was never given the proper direction to fulfill these expectations. Willy and Biff, although close when Biff was younger, are always at odds because Biff hasn't lived up to Willy's great expectations for him. Willy taught his sons the wrong things, and now their lives are mediocre because of it. Now Biff is a bum who can't hold a job anywhere but in the West as a farmhand, and Hap is a philandering assistant's assistant who is just as deluded about his importance as Willy. Not only that, but he has taught his sons the wrong things. He realizes that he is a failure and he has wasted his life. He even started believing that he was as important as he convinced the boys he was whenever he couldn't live up to that expectation, and reality contradicted the image he tried to put forth, his whole life began to crumble. Willy pretended to be an important, respected, and successful salesman to win the love and respect of his family (and himself in some ways). Throughout his life, Willy attempted to show his sons the keys to success and to prepare them, or at least Biff, his oldest son, for excellence in the business world. Despite this, Willy insisted that his success would come from being well liked. This was something that his brother, Ben, a man independently wealthy by the age of twenty-one, tried to tell him years ago. You can't touch appointments and half-hearted sentiments. But now, as he nears the end of his life, he realizes that the only things you can count on are the things you can touch.
Willy always believed that being well liked was the key to success - it's not what you know, it's who you know. Having been demoted to a strictly commissions salesman, as he was in the beginning of his career, Willy begins to wonder what missed opportunity or wrong turn led his life to this dismal existence. He keeps drifting back and forth between reality and memory, looking for exactly where his life went wrong. Willy Loman, a sixty-year-old traveling salesman, is having trouble lately because he can't seem to keep his mind on the present.
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