Act 2 Part 2 Past, Present, Imaginations

Miller combines scenes of the past and the present to demonstrate the idea that Willy is stuck in the past. Willy often remembers the past to be “good” and “better times” which overshadow the present. Willy’s imagination, for example his dialogues with his brother Ben, also shows different sides of Willy to the audience. One, it shows that Willy is thinking about what could have been- of how his life could have been much better had he listened to his brother and followed him to Alaska. The other side is that of Willy’s unstable mental health. This reminded me of Ken Kessey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which the narrator is a patient of the mental hospital suffering from hallucinations, so the reader has to question whether his story is real or a figment of his imagination. For the most part I believed all parts of Willy’s story to be real and that Miller employed the imaginations to suggest that Willy was slowly losing his mind- so much so that he goes and takes his own life.