“Death of Salesman” by Arthur Miller is an interesting study of American society. It is a great tragedy of modern man and show the social reality of common man. It deals with theme of the individual versus society. Esther Jackson rightly remarks
“Death of Salesman represents
‘perhaps most nearly nature
myth about human suffering
in an industrial age.”
The characters in this play ‘Death of Salesman’ are mostly types rather than individuals. They are subtle and psychosocial characters. In the character of Biff, Arthur showed the different variety of life. Biff is the only one character who can accept the reality of his life and also tries to show the real condition to his father. Now we discuss the character Sketch of Biff in detailed.
Biff is a victim of the maddening world of competition. He feels suffocated in such a world of competition and fails to find out real and permanent joy in nature. His life is a tale of emptiness and frustration; it is like a tale told by an idiot full of sound signifying nothing. We meet him in the play; he is already thirty-four and a good-for-nothing. He tells Happy,
“I’ve always made a point
of not wasting my life, and
every time I come back here.
know that all I’ve done is
to waste my life
He does not even know that his dreams and desires should be. He is a lost, a lost man. In this way, He suffers from a sense of lostness, of futility and of aimlessness. Failure and waste are the hallmarks of his life. There is the nightmare of despair and nothingness in his life.
As a boy, Biff was thought to be almost a prodigy of his father. Willy lionized his son and kept telling him that he had a great future before him. Willy found in him a rich potential. Willy says that Biff is a very hard working young man with a lot of a personal attractiveness. He says about him, “There is one thing about
Biff-he’s not lazy.”
He distinguished himself in sport and became the most sought-after football player. His schoolmates idolized him and felt proud to carry his kit. The girls were crazy about him and were willing to spend their own money on his to have his company. He never chased any of the girls. Willy also praised that he seemed to possess all those qualities which indicate a bright future for a growing young man.
There is evidence much earlier that Biff like his father was a dreamer who lives into illusions. Biff began to nurse certain illusions about himself and his future. On entering the arena of life, he found all his dreams of a rose future dissolving into thin air. He wandered from place to place, took up joy after joy, but failed to make good. He has not been able to find ‘himself’ yet. He speaks of buying a ranch and raising cattle because he believed that men built like him and his brother Happy should be works out in the open.
Biff is quite fond of his mother and is on very cordial term with her. But he is indifferent towards his father. The reason for his indifferent attitude towards his father is revealed to us in a kind of flash-back when we learn that he had discovered his father with a strange woman in a Boston hotel where he had gone to see Willy in order to inform him of his failure in the examination. Since that shocking discovery, Biff has not been able to reconcile himself to his father. However, a very late stage, it appears that he has always loved his father after all.
Before the end of play, we see that his character contradicts to his father. We have been a witness to Biff’s disillusionment with the false hopes and dreams that he has been cherishing. Biff’s eyes have been opened by his disastrous meeting with Bill Oliver. Biff breaks away from his father’s dream of him and from his self justifying dreams of himself. In the poignant confrontation with his father, he shatters the Loman Myth.
“I’m not a leader of men, Willy
and neither you. You were never
anything but a hardworking
drummer who landed in the
ashcan life all the rest of them!”
We must give Biff the credit for having realized how foolish those dreams of his father were. We begin to feel by the end of the play having discovery of the reality, Biff is now in a better position to build up his life.
To sum up, Biff seems a representative of the sons of the middle class for who the middle class dream has failed. The people of younger generation see in him a reflection of their own predicament. His failure in life a terrible illustration of the tremendous waste of human resources in a world maddening competition. By using the character of Biff Miller tried to show the situation of American Society:
“There is the small hope that
Biff may overcome his retarda
tion; alternatively, he may
remain a misfit in any society;
he will not possess the same
wrong dreams as his father.”
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