The Who’s Who of the Loman Home

Willy Loman, the play’s titular salesman. He wears the mask of a successful man in order to hide his failures, even to himself. However, as the play progresses, Willy descends into insanity. He becomes unable to distinguish between past and present and these flashback impress upon him how unaccomplished he is in his professional life. Although his job requires him to be likeable, he is not, and becoming increasingly aware of this failure:

WILLY: You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don’t seem to take to me.

Willy adores his elder son to the point where this love turns harmful. In contrast, he is rude and short-tempered to his wife despite her very deep love for him.

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Linda Loman, Willy’s wife. She is attentive and caring to her husband. Although his suicide attempts are difficult for her, she does deals with it with grace. However, she does not dare break him out of his delusions. Linda is a very round character because she changes throughout the play. Although initially an even-tempered character, she eventually stands up for her husband and herself in the end of Act II, when she tells her sons to get out and not come back because they do not care enough about Willy.

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Biff Loman, the elder Loman son. He was praised incessantly in his youth due to his skill in American Football. This instilled within him the belief that he could do no wrong. The loss of trust in his father is why he chooses to give up a scholarship despite only having to take a summer class in order to secure it. Biff is a kleptomaniac; he steals symbols of wealth in order to seem successful. this also makes it difficult for him to keep a job. He aspires to head out west in order to find a job on a ranch, but this is not in line with his father’s aspirations for him. Biff is the character that develops the most in the play. By the end of it, he accepts that Willy’s hopes for him are impossible:

BIFF: Now you hit it on the nose! (He gets up, throws the flowers in the wastebasket.) The scum of the earth, and you’re looking at him!

He confronts his father about the masks he wears and about the impossibility of the American Dream. At the funeral, he voices the truth about his father:

BIFF: He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.

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Happy Loman, the younger Loman son. At first, Happy seems to be a successful assistant buyer. However, as the play progresses, we discover this to be a lie: he is only the assistant to the assistant buyer. Happy is like his father in that he believes in the American Dream, and is obsessed with success. He even lies to the girls at the restaurant that Biff is a quarterback with the New York Giants because that increases his social standing in their eyes. In the requiem, he gets angry when Biff says that Willy was wrong to believe in the Dream and sets out to prove him wrong:

HAPPY: All right, boy. I’m gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It’s the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man. He fought it out here, and this is where I’m gonna win it for him.

Happy is a static character. Although the audience’s perception of him changes, he does not. His character is used to show the audience that some still believe in the American Dream despite all proof to the contrary.