In the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, the dreams of the main characters are at the center of the plot. The Lomans, especially Willy, struggle to achieve their dreams while fearing those goals are unattainable. Yet this fear is necessary for hope; Willy would rather dream than succeed. It's the destruction of his dream that destroys him, not just his failure. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Willy Loman, the play's central character, dreams of business success. He wants to be liked, a quality which he believes is the key to success. He also wants his sons to follow in his footsteps and be popular. However, at the very moment of the play, Willy's dreams have clearly failed. He's a salesman in his sixties whose friends are all dead and who gets fired in the middle of the room. One of his sons is a farm laborer, the other is in the business world as an assistant to an assistant. Willy spends the play thinking back to his best days and often believing them to be reality. His obsession with dreams prevents him from seeing the wreckage of his life. Willy does not want to acknowledge the state of his life and uses his daydreams to escape knowledge. He even acts accordingly, refusing to save the present if it means breaking with his goal. He desperately begs Howard, his boss, to give him a job, and is willing to accept ridiculously low wages to continue being a salesman, even a salesman who sells nothing. After Howard refuses, Willy, unemployed, will not accept a gift of fifty dollars per 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 and studious teenager who becomes a high-ranking lawyer, advises Willy that sometimes the best thing to do is to grow out of failure. However, Willy will not move away from his dreams. Yet he sometimes wonders if he was right to dream in the first place. His doubts take the form of the death of his brother Ben, who made his fortune in African diamonds and Alaskan timber. Ben urges Willy to seek the real, the practical, what can be felt, inviting him to travel to Alaska to work with real wood. Yet Ben is nothing more than a fantasy, a form that is itself unreal. He is the only one of Willy's imagination who speaks to him in the present world, noticing his surroundings and having conversations that are clearly not memories. He may be a symbol of Willy's plight, but he is no more substantial than that: he is Willy's model for imagined success, and his very presence underscores 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 room are the solidly pragmatic Howard, Charley, and Bernard. This doesn't stop Willy from trying to impose his hopes on his family and destroying them in the process. His wife Linda, although she appears to have no vision, constantly tries to shield Willy from reality, encouraging her sons to lie to her about their own fortunes. Happy does it willingly, too willingly; he pursues his father's dream even though he recognizes that he does not enjoy the fruits of his labor, suggesting that the reason is his "competitive nature". This early realization hints at why Willy pursues his dream: because it is a dream and because he needs something to pursue. After Willy's death, Charley verifies this by saying, "A salesman...[must] dream,".