In Arthur Miller's comedy Death of a Salesman, the dreams of the main characters are the central focus of the plot. The Lomans, especially Willy, struggle to achieve their dreams fearing that these goals are unattainable. Yet this fear is necessary for hope; Willy would much rather dream than succeed. It is the destruction of his dream that destroys him, not simply his failure. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Willy Loman, the central character of the work, dreams of success in business. He wants to be well-liked, a quality he believes is the key to success. He also wants his children to follow in his footsteps and be popular. Over the course of the show, however, Willy's dreams have obviously failed. He's a sixty-year-old salesman whose friends are all dead and who gets fired halfway through the show. One of his sons is a farm laborer, the other works in the business world as a clerk's assistant. Willy spends the show thinking back to his better days and often believing they are reality. His obsession with dreams prevents him from seeing the disaster in his life. Willy does not want to recognize the state of his life and uses his daydreams to escape awareness. He also acts accordingly, refusing to save the present if it means moving away from his goal. He desperately begs Howard, his boss, to give him a job, and is willing to accept absurdly low wages to continue being a salesman, even a salesman who doesn't sell anything. After Howard refuses, jobless Willy won't accept a gift of fifty dollars a week from his pragmatic friend Charley. Accepting this salary would mean admitting defeat, even if it would save his family. Charley repeatedly asks Willy, "When are you going to grow up?" and Charley's son Bernard, a practical, studious teenager who becomes a high-ranking lawyer, advises Willy that sometimes the best thing to do is walk away from failure. Yet Willy will not abandon his dreams. Yet he sometimes wonders if he was right to dream all along. His doubts take the form of the death of his brother Ben, who made his fortune in African diamonds and Alaskan lumber. Ben urges Willy to seek the real, the practical, the feelable, inviting him to go to Alaska to work with real lumber. However, Ben is nothing more than a ghost, an unreal form itself. He is the only one of Willy's imaginaries who addresses him in the present world, noticing his surroundings and having conversations that are clearly not memories. He may be a symbol of Willy's anguish, but he is no more substantial than that: he is Willy's model for imagined success, and his very presence underlines the impossibility of Willy's goal. Men who enter the jungle at seventeen and come out rich at twenty-one do not exist; the only truly successful people in the play are the solidly pragmatic Howard, Charley, and Bernard. That doesn't stop Willy from trying to foist his hopes on his family, and destroying them in the process. His wife Linda, although she doesn't seem to have any vision of her own, constantly tries to shield Willy from reality, encouraging her children to lie to him about their fortunes. Happy does it willingly, too willingly; he follows his father's dream even though he acknowledges that he does not enjoy the fruits of his labor, suggesting that his "competitive nature" is the reason. This first realization suggests why Willy chases the dream: because it is a dream and because he needs something to pursue. After Willy's death,.