Ben and Biff’s

In Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, the character Biff is the son of Willy Loman, the protagonist. The character Ben is Willy’s brother. They are very different but they share some similarities. Biff is real, in the sense that he appears in the play in the present, while Ben is a hallucination and a product of Willy’s delusions, appearing in an alternate time-line. Biff is Willy’s hope for the future and a symbol of his own lost hopes and dreams. Ben is a paragon of success and a standard for which Willy strives.

Barron’s Booknotes says of Ben, “From the moment we see Ben he turns out to be a highly idealized figure, for Willy’s memory turns him into a god,” (Miller, Williams, Paul 1984 p 21). Both characters further the plot but Ben is more purely a rhetorical device that helps to drive the play by allowing the audience a glimpse inside the mind of Willy Loman in a way that would be difficult otherwise. Both Biff and Ben are adept at taking Willy’s mind off his own problems.

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He goes into a sort of hallucinatory trance and speaks to both characters when he is troubled. Sometimes these conversations are rehashes of conversations past and sometimes they are conversations carried on as Willy wishes they had been. Willy remembers conversations with his brother that never happened. He believes that his brother is the success that he is not and the success that he wants his son to be so he wants Ben to explain the secrets of making a fortune.

Both Ben and Biff are amoral and have virtually no social values. Biff is willing to steal and goes out of his way to take a pen as a sort of trophy to show he is superior to someone to whom he actually is subservient. Ben knocks down his nephew Biff in a fight and then tells him that is ok to cheat and do anything necessary to win against a stranger. “Ben, patting Biff’s knee: Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way,” (Act I p 49).

Biff’s mother does not like this advice but Biff obviously believes that it is a good motto to live by. His father, Willy, then instructs him to steal material from a construction site. Biff and Ben both seem to think that the end justifies whatever means is used to achieve their goals. Ben shows that he is proud of Biff for being a thief. He praises Biff for having the courage to steal from the construction site, showing he is not afraid. Biff comes to realize his father is a failure at life and his idea of how to achieve dreams is not logical.

Biff is more like his Uncle Ben, who treats him as the person he really is and not like the image that he wants to create, as his father does, living on imagined past glory. The characters of Biff and Ben are used by Miller to allow Willy to vent his rage and frustration. They both give Willy Loman an opportunity to address the audience. It shows he is losing his grasp of reality, of course, but more so, it gives Miller the opportunity to advance the themes of the play in a direct way. He is not ‘dime-a-dozen’, he is Willy Loman, Miller has him say.

Ben and Biff both say things to Willy that makes Linda, his wife, try to protect him. “Linda, frightened of Ben and angry at him: Don’ t say those things to him. (He is doing) well enough to be happy right here. Right now,” (Act II p 8). They say things that she doesn’t want Willy to have to deal with. Both Ben and Biff are characters that have a close relationship with Willy even though Willy doesn’t really know either of them. He is lost in his own world. Ben is more the realist than is Willy. He is a man who does not live in the past.

He grabs what he wants and makes it his own. Biff at last loses his rose-colored glasses and accepts his uncle’s view of the life. He sees that he is more like his uncle than he realized and that he is nothing like his father. He at last understands that his father is a loser and a tragedy. References Miller, A. , Weales, G. Death of a Salesman New York: Penguin Group 1977 Miller, A. , Williams, L. and Paul, K. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (Barron’s Booknotes) Hauppauge, N. Y. : Barron’s Educational Series, Inc. Copyright 1984

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