Saturday, August 30, 2014

What is the significance of the suitcases, the stockings and the fact the woman Willy is having an affair with has no name?

All three have one thing in common: They represent three items with which Willy felt dominant, and which represent the power he no longer has. They are the power symbols of his past and the doom of his present.


The suitcase is the symbol of his job; the traveling salesman who, at one point, was successful (but now isn't).


The woman with no name represents how Willy is willing to ruin his marriage and be unfaithful to his family with someone who may have no importance in his life. Yet, for this very item of no importance, he basically ruins his relationship with his son.


The stockings, an expensive item back in the time of the story, again represents Willy as a powerful, lusty, businessman who can provide for a fling with expensive gifts (even if the woman will eventually disappear). If you notice, Willy continues to ramble about his wife's condition of her stockings, perhaps in a sense of guilt of what he did to her years ago, which was to give the other woman his wife's stockings.


In all, they are all fragments of Willy's past, and the symbols of his days of yore, who are now gone forever, and which he still mourns in bouts of insanity.

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