Death of a Salesman Foreshadowing Quotes

A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises. Before us is the Salesman’s house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides. Only the blue light of the sky falls upon the house and forestage; the surrounding area shows an angry glow of orange.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Even before a character enters or speaks, we are introduced to some of the important themes and figures of speech in these stage directions, the first words of the play. Music is heard and flute is personified, as it tells of a pastoral and idyllic scene of grass and trees. This sets a peaceful tone. When the curtain rises, the house of salesman Willy Loman is revealed. Having a home of one’s own is one of the most frequently cited examples of having attained the American Dream. But the Loman dream and home appear to be under threat. The city has encroached on the house, now surrounded on all sides by towering skyscrapers, suggesting that Willy is trapped in his big dreams. The "angry glow of orange" contrasts with the image of the blue sky, creating an unsettling atmosphere and foreshadowing future events. The color orange is personified here. The passage’s theme of nature vs city symbolizes the conflict within Willy. His love of the great outdoors competes with his salesman’s dream of finding prosperity and building success in the artificial and materialistic world of the city.

I’m tired to the death. I couldn’t make it. I just couldn’t make it, Linda.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. In the first scene of the play, Willy Loman explains to his wife Linda why he couldn’t make it to his sales calls that day in New England. The 63-year-old salesman is exhausted traveling from New York to England for his job. Having returned home early to New York, the mentally and physically spent Willy’s words foreshadow his suicide later in the play. They also highlight how he constantly falls short in his desperate attempts to achieve his unattainable American Dream of prosperity and success.

I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But it’s so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me. And then all of a sudden I’m goin’ off the road! I’m tellin’ya, I absolutely forgot I was driving. If I’d’ve gone the other way over the white line I might’ve killed somebody. So I went on again – and five minutes later I’m dreamin’ again.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Having been on the road as a traveling salesman for 34 years, Willy Loman is showing signs of mental instability. In this conversation with his wife Linda, he describes how he lapses in and out of a dream state while driving on his sales trip to New England, almost careering off the road. Willy’s difficulty in distinguishing between reality and illusion is shown here, as his mind constantly oscillates between one state and the other. This speech also deals with the theme of nature vs city. Willy rhapsodizes about the heavenly scenery of rural America that he encounters on his trip – "so beautiful up there…the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm." With his passion for nature, Willy should have taken a job ourdoors, instead of an office job. His decision to opt for a life in New York city clearly seems to be the wrong one. He is a man more in tune with the natural world who in this passage is yearning to escape and be free. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed here.

WILLY: I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.
LINDA: Willy, dear. Talk to them again. There’s no reason why you can’t work in New York.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy arrives home to wife Linda after his aborted sales trip to New England, mentally troubled. He has confessed to lapsing into a trance-like state while driving and almost going off the road in his car. At the beginning of the play, we learn that Willy is considering suicide, admitting to having "strange" thoughts. But Linda does not confront Willy about this, despite the fact that he is in clear need of phychological help and care. She insists that he is just tired and asks him to request a job transfer to New York, so he doesn’t need to travel anymore. Linda’s failure to admit to her husband’s mental problems means that she is a classic enabler who prevents Willy from getting the help he clearly needs. Willy’s words foreshadow his suicide.

HAPPY: He stops at a green light and then it turns red and he goes. (He laughs.)
BIFF: Maybe he’s color-blind.
HAPPY: Pop? Why he’s got the finest eye for color in the business. You know that.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Happy and Biff joke about their father’s growing mental instability. Making light of Willy’s bad driving, his unsympathic sons prefer to see the funny side of his inability to see reality rather than the danger. This passage is full of irony and foreshadowing of Willy’s suicide by car crash.

BIFF: What’s he say about me?
HAPPY: I think the fact that you’re not settled, that you’re still kind of up in the air…
BIFF: There’s one or two other things depressing him, Happy.
HAPPY: What do you mean?
BIFF: Never mind. Just don’t lay it all to me.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. This passage deals with the conflict between Willy and Biff. When Biff asks if his father says anything bad about him, Happy explains that the reason for Willy’s unkindness to him is because Biff is aimless with no direction to his life. However, Biff suggests that there is more to Willy’s moodiness than that. Both brothers are right. Willy is upset over what he sees as Biff’s lack of progress in job and career, but Willy also feels a disappointment to himself and his family. Biff is also hinting that he knows something bad about his father, a secret he doesn’t share with Happy. We learn later that the teenage Biff walked in on Willy having an affair with a woman in a Boston hotel room. This revelation is foreshadowed here.

He’s gotta study, Uncle Willy. He’s got Regents next week….Listen, Biff, I heard Mr. Birnbaum say that if you don’t start studying math he’s gonna flunk you, and you won’t graduate. I heard him!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. This is said by the Lomans’ neighbor’s son Bernard during one of Willy’s flashbacks or hallucinations. The studious Bernard acts as the voice of reality, correctly expressing concern that Biff is going to fail math because he is simply not studying it. Bernard later becomes a successful attorney, while Biff fails to get the math credits needed to graduate and loses his scholarships. Biff’s academic failures are foreshadowed here.

BIFF: Oh, Pop, you didn’t see my sneakers! (He holds up a foot for Willy to look at.)
WILLY: Hey, that’s a beautiful job of printing!
BERNARD (wiping his glasses): Just because he printed University of Virginia on his sneakers doesn’t mean they’ve got to graduate him. Uncle Willy!
WILLY (angrily): What’re you talking about? With scholarships to three universities they’re gonna flunk him?
BERNARD: But I heard Mr. Birnbaum say…
WILLY: Don’t be a pest, Bernard! (To his boys.) What an anemic!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. At the beginning of the play young Biff’s University of Virginia sneakers are symbolic of the promising future he has before him. The star of his high school football team, a proud Willy boasts that Biff has scholarships to three universities and there is little standing in the way of his success. But it is the misplaced pride of a deluded father, who deceives himself into believing that Biff’s popularity rather than hard work is his springboard to success. A young Bernard, son of Willy’s friend Charley, makes his first appearance in this flashback of Willy’s. But Willy ignores the studious boy’s warnings that Biff’s high school teacher is threatening to fail him at math because he is not studying. Bernard’s role in the play may be minor one, but it is a significant one. His warning to Willy is foreshadowing of Biff’s failure to graduate from high school.

You want him to be a worm like Bernard? He’s got spirit, personality.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Willy says this to Linda about Biff, after Bernard warns that if Biff "doesn’t knuckle down he’s flunk maths." Willy doesn’t want his son to become a book worm and nerd like Bernard. But the irony is that Bernard is the one who succeeds as a lawyer as a result of his hard work. After failing high school maths and not graduating Biff doesn’t amount to very much career-wise. His academic failure is foreshadowed here.

WILLY: You shoulda seen the lumber they brought home last week. At least a dozen six-by-tens worth all kinds a money.
CHARLEY: Listen, if that watchman…
WILLY: I gave them hell, understand. But I got a couple of fearless characters there.
CHARLEY: Willy, the jails are full of fearless characters.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. The kind of moral values Willy has instilled in his sons leaves a lot to be desired. Here Willy’s neighbor Charley has criticized him for sending his boys to a nearby construction site to get sand to rebuild the front porch and they return with stolen timber. Willy proudly boasts about his children’s fearlessness, actually praising and encouraging their stealing. But Charley retorts that the jails are full of fearless characters, foreshadowing that Biff will wind up going to jail for stealing a suit.

I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. In one of the play’s most famous speeches, Linda makes this impassioned appeal for the ordinary human being to be respected and afforded their dignity. Accepting her husband’s weaknesses, she strongly defends him to her two sons after Biff calls him crazy and says he has no character. Her soliloquy admonishes and pleads with them not to abandon him. It is her cry of insistance on the dignity of the weak, those cast aside by the system, and not just the strong. The life and death of the little man is of as much importance as that of the great man, she believes. The message of her speech is that every human being matters and no one is disposable. This includes an insignificant person like Willy, betrayed and abandoned by a capitalist system that has no further use for him. Miller uses pathos throughout the play but here it is heightened as Linda, who is devoted to Willy, asks for respect to be shown to her flawed husband. During this key moment we hear in Linda’s voice the rage of Miller as he questions the morality of a society that uses people as tools for profit and then discards them. Employing a graphic simile, Linda pleads with Biff to reconcile with his father and not abandon him so that he dies "like an old dog." Linda appears to accept the inevitability of Willy’s imminent death, which is foreshadowed here. The passage shows her deep devotion to Willy.

I’m – I’m ashamed to. How can I mention it to him? Every day I go down and take away that little rubber pipe. But, when he comes home, I put it back where it was. How can I insult him that way? I don’t know what to do. I live from day to day, boys. I tell you, I know every thought in his mind. It sounds so old-fashioned and silly, but I tell you he put his whole life into you and you’ve turned your backs on him. (She is bent over in the chair, weeping, her face in her hands.) Biff, I swear to God! Biff, his life is in your hands!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Linda Loman is the classic enabler, whose passive ways contributes to the dysfunction of the Loman men. She supports their bad decisions and fails to call them out when they are wrong. Her enabling is very obvious when she learns of her husband’s suicide attempts. He has been attaching a rubber pipe to the gas line and inhaling the deadly carbon monoxide. Instead of urging her husband to stop, Linda says nothing out of fear of insulting him, but simply removes the pipe each day. She admonishes her sons Biff and Happy for turning their backs on their father, insinuating that their abandonment is linked to his suicidal thoughts. This passage foreshadows Willy’s suicide.

All right, pal, all right. It’s all settled now. I’ve been remiss. I know that, Mom. But now I’ll stay, and I swear to you, I’ll apply myself. (Kneeling in front of her, in a fever of self-reproach.) It’s just – you see, Mom, I don’t fit in business. Not that I won’t try. I’ll try, and I’ll make good.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 1. Biff admits to being the neglectful son, after Linda chides him and his brother for not helping more with their father. Biff promises to reform and and stay in New York city and find a job. But when he warns "I don’t fit into business," we know that he will have difficulty fitting into Willy’s expectations for him to follow his father into the world of business and sales. This is foreshadowed here.

You know that little rubber pipe I told you about? That he connected to the gas heater? I finally decided to go down the cellar this morning and take it away and destroy it. But it’s gone! Imagine? He took it away himself, it isn’t there!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed by Linda’s reference to her husband connecting the rubber pipe to the gas heater. Speaking to Biff on the phone, Linda is at first happy that the pipe has been removed and thinks that Willy did this himself. But she is disappointed when she learns it is Biff who took away the pipe.

And have a nice time with Dad. He may have big news too!…That’s right, a New York job. And be sweet to him tonight, dear. Be loving to him. Because he’s only a little boat looking for a harbor. (She is trembling with sorrow and joy.)

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. In a phone conversation with Biff ahead of Willy’s job interview, Linda shows that she shares her husband’s tendency towards self-deception and false hope. She is convinced that Willy will get the job in New York and also that Biff can be sweet and loving towards his father despite the animosity between them. In a metaphor foreshadowing Willy’s suicide, Linda likens her husband to a small boat lost at sea and in search of a harbor. Linda’s great love and loyalty towards Willy are demonstrated here.

Willy, I remember it was June, and our grades came out. And he’d flunked math…Biff just got very angry, I remember, and he was ready to enroll in summer school…He wasn’t beaten by it at all. But then, Willy, he disappeared from the block for almost a month. And I got the idea that he’d gone up to New England to see you. Did he have a talk with you then?

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Bernard recalls how Biff visited his father in Boston after failing math to speak to him about his future. He queries Willy on why after the visit Biff suddenly disappeared and refused to go to summer school. This is foreshadowing of the reason Biff dropped out of the education system. Later in this act we learn that a devastated Biff walked in on the father he idolized cheating on his mother with another woman in a Boston hotel room.

After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy is speaking to his friend Charley after losing his job and having had to borrow money from Charley to pay his bills. After a lifetime of working Willy is hit with the realization that he is a failure, being unable to earn enough money to sustain himself and his wife Linda. Seeing no way out of his financial difficulties, he vocalizes the idea of killing himself so that his family can collect the life insurance money. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed here.

BIFF: Yeah, but he doesn’t mean anything to you. You could help him – I can’t. Don’t you understand what I’m talking about? He’s going to kill himself, do you know that?
HAPPY: Don’t I know it! Me!
BIFF: Hap, help him! Jesus…help him…Help me, help me, I can’t bear to look at his face!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Biff appeals to his brother Happy to help Willy after his display of mental and emotional instability at the restaurant. Worried that Willy is going to kill himself, Biff shows Happy the hose found in Willy’s basement. Yet the two brothers abandon their father in the restaurant and leave with two girls. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed here.

A man can’t go out the way, he came in, Ben, a man has got to add up to something. You can’t, you can’t – You gotta consider, now. Don’t answer so quick. Remember, it’s a guaranteed twenty-thousand-dollar proposition. Now look, Ben, I want you to go through the ins and outs of this thing with me. I’ve got nobody to talk to, Ben, and the woman has suffered, you hear me?…It’s twenty thousand dollars on the barrelhead. Guaranteed, gilt-edged, you understand?

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy has a conversation with his hallucination of brother Ben in a passage filled with despair and hope. A man has to accomplish something, he points out to Ben. Having failed in life, Willy hopes to be successful in death by leaving his family a financial legacy. His plan is to commit suicide and give his family twenty thousand pounds through his life insurance. There is irony in Willy saying that his wife Linda has suffered, because killing himself will prolong her suffering. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed here.

BEN: You don’t want to make a fool of yourself. They might not honor the policy.
WILLY: How can they dare refuse? Didn’t I work like a coolie to meet every premium on the nose? And now they don’t pay off? Impossible!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Ben warns Willy that his life insurance company might not honor his policy in the event of his suicide. That would mean no insurance payout to Willy’s family. We don’t know if the death was eventually ruled a suicide. Willy argues that the company cannot refuse to pay, as he has been paying into the policy for a large part of his life. This foreshadows Willy going ahead with his suicide plan so his family can collect on the insurance.

BEN: It’s called a cowardly thing, William.
WILLY: Why? Does it take more guts to stand here the rest of my life ringing up a zero?
BEN (yielding): That’s a point, William. (He moves, thinking, turns.) And twenty thousand – that is something one can feel with the hand, it is there.
WILLY (now assured, with rising power): Oh, Ben, that’s the whole beauty of it! I see it like a diamond, shining in the dark, hard and rough, that I can pick up and touch in my hand. Not like – like an appointment! This would not be another damned fool appointment, Ben, and it changes all the aspects. Because he thinks I’m nothing, see, and so he spites me. But the funeral – (Straightening up) Ben, that funeral will be massive! They’ll come from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire! All the oldtimers with the strange license plates – that boy will be thunderstruck, Ben, because he never realized – I am known! Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey – I am known, Ben, and he’ll see it with his eyes once and for all.

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy, talking to his hallucination of Ben, fantasizes that he will achieve the success in death that he failed to reach in life. He has fallen short of his American Dream of acquiring material success while alive. But he believes that the twenty thousand dollars life insurance money his family will receive after his suicide will make up for that. In a simile Willy compares this money to a diamond, diamonds being the symbol of wealth used throughout the play and associated with brother Ben. Willy deceives himself into believing that his funeral will be massive and attended by many of the people who knew and worked with him. His estranged son Biff will realize how wrong he was wrong about his dad by the size of the funeral, he believes. Willy’s words turn to be ironic, since nobody outside the family apart from two neighbors turns up for the funeral. Willy’s suicide is foreshadowed here.

Loves me…Always loved me. Isn’t that a remarkable thing? Ben, he’ll worship me for it!

– Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman, Act 2. There is tragic irony in Willy’s realization that Biff really does love him and this provides him with another reason to commit suicide. Having already decided to take his life, Willy believes that Biff will love him even more when he shares in the twenty thousand dollar life insurance payout to the Lomans. Willy, blinded by a distorted view of reality and clinging to the materialistic values of capitalism, manages to transforms a moment of happiness at his estranged son loving him into something tragic. He is a deluded man who never learns from his actions. Willy remains misguided and deceives himself to the end, even in his final act of love. Biff is not interested in his father’s money, he simply wants to to enjoy an honest relationship with Willy that is based on the truth of who each of them really is. Willy’s immiment suicide is foreshadowed here.
Close