‘Dreams are what you wake up from’ (Raymond Carver).

This critique of the “commodification” of American life is evident throughout the novel, epitomised by the figure of ‘T.J. Eckleberg’ gazing over the ruins of “early twentieth-century commercialism”. In addition there is a veiled attack on how this commercialism ends up mechanising and undermining human life, highlighting the link between “capitalism and superficiality”. The fateful car is described in detail loaded with the sense of Gatsby’s extravagant wealth, as is the description of the dead Myrtle Wilson, body parts flapping and “swinging loose”, the futility of checking the “heart beat”. The human empathy is completely absent as she is delineated as a mechanised object. Simmel explores this notion of social deterioration in the context of free market capitalist societies, positing “the modern metropolis… is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness… and need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships”.

In Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’ we see the Franklinesque dream and protestant work-ethic embodied in the context of an expanding consumerist culture and a time when “entrepreneurship became the primary model of American identity”. The broken refrigerator is one of several symbols of wealth and consumption with inherent flaws. By obscuring exactly what it is that Willie sells, Miller universalises the ‘salesman’ as a discreet entity, one which is caught between a dialectic of empiricism, and spirituality through personal achievement and self-fulfillment. Willie’s aspirations to fulfill his abstract conception of the post-war American dream have to be constantly reconciled with the material statistics of sales and profit margins. The marginalisation of the female presence and the collective narcissism of Biff and Happy are indications of the domestic and social implications of the American Dream.