The Woman claims that Willy ruined her and did not live up to his promises to her. The WomanĪn assistant in a company in Boston with which Willy does business, this nameless character has a continuing affair with Willy. He helps Willy home after Biff and Happy leave their father there. Stanley is the waiter at the restaurant where Willy meets his sons. Howard is preoccupied with technology when Willy meets with his new boss, he spends most of the meeting demonstrating his new wire recorder. Although Willy was the one who named Howard, Howard is forced to fire Willy for his erratic behavior. The thirty-six year old son of Frank Wagner, Willy Loman's former boss, Howard now occupies the same position as his late father. Ben represents the fantastic success for which Willy has always hoped but can never seem to achieve. Although Ben died several weeks before the time at which the play is set, he often appears in Willy's hallucinations, carrying a valise and umbrella. Willy's older brother, Ben left home at seventeen to find their father in Alaska, but ended up in Africa, where he found diamond mines and came out of the jungle at twenty-one an incredibly rich man. As a grown-up, he is a lawyer preparing to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court. It is this absence of spirit that makes Willy believe that Bernard will never be a true success in the business world, but Bernard proves himself to be far more successful than Willy imagined. He is intelligent and industrious but lacks the gregarious personality of either of the Loman sons.
He and Willy have a contentious relationship, but Charley is nevertheless Willy's only friend. Although Willy claims that Charley is a man who is "liked, but not well-liked," he owns his own business and is respected and admired. The Lomans' next door neighbor and father of Bernard, Charley is a good businessman, exemplifying the success that Willy is unable to achieve. Happy is a compulsive womanizer who treats women purely as sex objects and has little respect for the many women whom he seduces. Happy, however, is not content with his more stable life, because he has never risked failure or striven for any real measure of success. The younger of the two Loman sons, Happy Loman is seemingly content and successful, with a steady career and none of the obvious marks of failure that his older brother displays. She is the moral center of the play, occasionally stern and not afraid to confront her sons about their poor treatment of their father. She is a woman who has aged greatly because of her difficult life with her husband, whose hallucinations and erratic behavior she contends with alone. The dutiful, obedient wife to Willy and mother of Biff and Happy, Linda Loman is the one person who supports Willy Loman, despite his often reprehensible treatment of her. Despite his failures and anger toward his father, Biff still has great concern for what his father thinks of him, and the conflict between the two characters drives the narrative of the play. Since then, Biff has been a continual failure, stealing at every job and even spending time in jail. He did this primarily out of spite after finding out that his father was having an affair with a woman in Boston. But he never attended college nor graduated from high school, after refusing to attend summer school to make up a flunked math class. The thirty-four year old son of Willy Loman, Biff was once a star high school athlete with a scholarship to UVA. As a salesman, Willy Loman focuses on personal details over actual measures of success, believing that it is personality and not high returns that garner success in the business world.
Although he has a dutiful wife, his relationship with his oldest son, Biff, is strained by Biff's continual failures. However, after thirty-five years working as a traveling salesman throughout New England, Willy Loman feels defeated by his lack of success and difficult family life. A sixty year old salesman living in Brooklyn, Willy Loman is a gregarious, mercurial man with powerful aspirations to success.
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