Glass Menagerie And D.O.S Essay, Research Paper

Dreams and aspirations help to keep alive, a sense of hope, something to live for. Yet if one does not make their dreams flexible they may fall short and thereby feel their life is unfulfilled. Both Tom Wingfield and Willy Loman in The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman, respectively, live every day with a hope that soon they will be able to achieve these goals that they have set forth for themselves. Yet due to obstinacy of Willy s dream it has become impalpable, while Tom has the ability to realize that a man can change his reveries based upon his current conditions.

The American Dream is a fabrication in which a man finds happiness with a house, a successful job, a nice car and a perfect family consisting of a wife and 2.5 children. Willy has geared his ambitions towards this dream. He can not accept the fact that he is just another salesman trying to convince his buyers of why his product is important. Willy feels that the only way to succeed in the business world is to be well-liked, yet he can not even do that. He creates illusions of his prosperity in order to cater to his unobtainable dream. Willy convinces himself and his sons when he says, Be liked and you will never want. You take me, for instance. I never wit in line to see a buyer. Willy Loman is here! That s all they have to know, and I go right through.

Willy Loman can not comprehend that not all dreams come to be and that if one sets their bar too high, they may have to lower it in order to be content in the future. Willy hopes and really believes that someday (he ll) have (his) own business, and (he ll) never have to leave home anymore. Willy s disturbing avoidance of his neighbor Charley is a direct denial of his present state. Charley is living the American Dream. He has worked hard and earned every morsel of food put on his table, every penny out of his pocket. Willy will not accept this and always becomes insulted when Charley tries to lend him a hand financially. Charley and Willy s conversation in Act II shows Willy s reluctance to admit failure. Willy has lost his job and therefore any source of reputable income and he still manipulates himself into thinking he has a job. Charley- I offered you a job. You can make fifty dollars a week. And I won t send you on the road. Willy- I ve got a job. Charley- Without pay? What kind of job is a job without pay ? Why don t you want to work for me? Willy- What s the matter with you? I ve got a job. Charley- I m offering you a job. Willy- I don t want your goddam job! By denying himself of his job, Willy is in fact denying himself of another chance at his dream. He could possibly work and rebuild his life and maybe one day open a business that is bigger than Uncle Charley( s).

Unfortunately Willy s dreams remain rigid and he bends reality in order to fit them. As the play concludes Willy s job is gone, his children are gone and his car is gone. A large portion of Willy s illusion has apparently, even to Willy, stripped from him. Since his dream was not ductile, Willy feels there is no reason to live anymore and makes his last attempt at providing a dream. Not for himself, but for his sons, who will hopefully live out the dream that he could not. Willy s suicide is a flagrant exertion to afford his family with adequate insurance compensation in order for Happy, his son, to finish what he hadn t even begun to; a life filled with sales, friends, a nuclear family and a house in the country. One must realize that it is an American Dream not a reality.

Tom escapes from reality in other, more mentally secure, ways. He attends the movies in order to live vicariously through the lives of those glamorous people- having adventures. Tom feels suffocated in his dwellings with a crippled sister and a pestering mother that he provides for. He is a young man and his aspirations are nothing more than to be a lover, a hunter, a fighter, yet none of (these) instincts are given much play at the warehouse (in which he works).

The difference in Tom s dream from Willy s dream is that Tom s is an artificiality of reality, whereas Willy s is an illusion of it. Tom therefore does not become infatuated with his dream and makes it a reality only in his mind. He knows that he is tired of what he is doing and so he moves on.

When returning home from the movies, Amanda, Tom s mother, questions him about being at the movies all night long. He responds by sarcastically telling and extravagant lie in which he saw a magician got nailed into a coffin and he got out of the coffin without removing a nail. Tom then jokes, There is a trick that would come in handy for me get me out of this two-by-four situation! Yet although he seems to layer his words thick with sarcasm there is truth behind his hope of breaking free from his two-by-four situation. He wants to live out his own life; he is tired of the movies. Tom is at a breaking point in Scene VI. He criticizes people, and almost Willy Loman, for going to the movies instead of moving! One can see that Tom is going to grab hold on his present day reality and toss it aside in order to find a dream that is not yet set out. He has no boundaries for what may become of him but he does know, unlike Willy, that his current situation is unhealthy for him. Tom says in Scene VI I m not patient. I don t want to wait till then. I m tired of the movies and I am about to move!

Therefore one can see the difference in outcomes of an inflexible dream and a malleable dream. Willy s life ends in suicide at a final attempt to live his dream through his sons but Tom s life has not yet ended and he still looks forward, trying to move on.