Willy Loman's American Dream

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I believe that solely “working hard” is not enough for somebody to achieve his/her American Dream. Although working hard is a great asset to have to achieve an American Dream, it takes much more to achieve that dream. A great mindset to have while achieving an American dream is to remember that ancestors and parents in family history didn’t always have it all. What I mean by this is that at one point in time, my family was coming to America on a boat with nothing but a change of clothes. While looking to the American Dream, sometimes someone is given box of seeds and asked to build a forest. A forest starts with one seed, not the forest itself. Another great asset for someone to have is for someone to learn and prosper from failure. In the …show more content…
. The first character that comes to mind while looking at the literature of Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, is a man named Willy who had an American Dream of being a successful salesman. He has a great mindset while he is creating a name for himself as a salesman. Willy claims that he is so successful that he “can park [his] car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own (Miller).” Later on in the story after he says this to brag about his successes as a salesman, he starts to decay in his profession and American Dream of being a salesman. The stressors of his life, and the declination of his American Dream start to get to him and lead him to commit suicide. This shows that working hard cannot guarantee the guidance to someone in his/her search to achieve his/her American Dream. In the literary work of Rethinking the American Dream by David Kamp, Kamp writes that the Declaration of Independence “compelled the well-to-do upper classes to put the common man on an equal footing with them where human rights and self-governance were concerned.” He is saying that the Declaration of Independence theoretically made it equally as attainable for the wealthy and the non-wealthy to achieve their American Dream. Whether wealthy or non-wealthy, a person had equal opportunity to create their own path to their American Dream. Although these two viewpoints show that there are two sides to the American Dream, it gives a glimpse into what can happen when someone creates a dream for himself or
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