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4.1 Introduction of the characters
4.1.1 Willy Loman
The main character in the book is Willy Loman, a elderly salesman who is about sixty years old. He is a man who has hopes and illusions in his life, but he does not seem to be able to put them into reality. His hopes are to become welthy and rich because he is an comission worker with low income who can not afford to pay his bills.
Willy has a wife, Linda, and two sons, Biff and Happy, who both are not succesful in their own lives. But Willy does not want to accept that, as he is living in his world of illusions and he thinks that both of them are great persons. He especially wants Biff, who he favours, to succeed in life because he himself never did. A major source of conflict exactly lies exactly in the problem of realizing that the boys both are not successful.
Later in his life, when this play takes place, Willy has problems to distiguish between past and present - for him: between illusion and reality - which puts the reader to the beginning of the familie´s problems by using flashbacks.
The beginning of the mentioned problems is an affair Willy has with a woman he meets on one of his business - trips. One day he is caught by Biff, who does not want to accept this affair and so does not respect his father any more. From now on, Willy and Biff cannot get along with each other any more and Willy commits suicide, so that his vision of his son getting rich becomes true, because Biff gets his father´s life insurance money.
4.1.2 Linda Loman
Linda is the person in the Loman family, who always wants to keep away trouble. Espiacially when Willy and his sons are arguing about their lives she is the one who is calming down the whole situation. She knows about Willy´s problems but stands behind him as she knows that he is tired and sick of life. She also knows that he had tried several times to kill himself and she knows that he will do it again, but she tolerates it because she knows how tired of life her husband is.
4.1.3 Happy Loman
Happy is the younger one of the two Loman sons. Though being the younger one, he is not favoured by his father because he is not very self - confident, which can be proved by the fact that he always changes the women he lives with. He lives in New York, but during the play he is at home to visit his family. He never wants to get in trouble with his dad and so he tries to keep the illusions his father believes in, for example he always says he is going to get married though this is not true at all.
Happy is a boy who is very similar to his dad. He thinks the way his father does, and also he believes that having a dream is enough in an man´s life, instead of fulfilling this dream.
4.1.4 Biff Loman
Biff Loman is Willy\'s son. The story mainly deals with the conflict between them. Biff was a star football player in high school but he failed in math in his senior year and so he was not allowed to graduate. Biff then changed his jobs several times and so was lost for fifteen years. He was even in jail because he stealed but now he has come home and the problems begin.
Willy always wanted Biff to become a business man what he himself never succeeded in. Biff himself, on his side, has the problem of either doing things his father would like him to or doing what he thinks it is right. Biff wants to lead a cattle ranch on his own, and Willy wants him to be a man of respectable business. By seeing the world through his illusions, Willy does not realize that Biff is a nobody in the real world. This conflict between the real world and Willy´s illusions is the main problem in the plot.
At the end of the play, Biff realizes that his father always lived in a illusionary world and he finds out, that it is not his destiny to become very successful in his life.
4.1.5 Other Characters
Charlie: He is the neighbour of the Loman family and he is also the one, who wants Willy to become more realistic and does his best to reach his aim. But he always refuses to listen and so they are not real friends, but they get along with each other.
Bernhard: He is Charlie´s son and a friend of Biff, who always wanted to learn with him because Biff should have been able to graduate High School. Bernhard in his life has studied and now he is a lawyer, a fact Willy has problems with because now Bernhard has reached a higher position in life than his son has.
Uncle Ben: Ben is Willy´s dead brother, who always appears in Willy´s flashbacks. Ben became a rich man in Africa as he had a diamond mine. He offered Willy to join him, but Willy refused and preferred to be a salesman.
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