A universal facet of humanity is our attempts to find meaning to our lives. “Meaning” in this case is not just why we are here but also what we are here for. Christianity provided the answer to these questions to Western countries for hundreds of years, until the Enlightenment began tearing it down. Philosophers and scientists started openly questioning the teachings of the Catholic Church and rejecting blind belief, instead adopting a more science-centric focus. Such thinking eventually results in nihilism, the philosophy that posits that there is no grand meaning to the universe, that we are all products of random chance and nothing matters. Two such plays explore this philosophy, Death of a Salesman and Hospitality Suite, and they explore how it crushes us through capitalism. Both plays are about nihilistic salesmen and their rejection or acceptance of traditional values. I will be analyzing these two plays mainly through Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas of nihilism.
In Death of a Salesman, 63-year-old Willy Loman falls deeper and deeper into self-delusion and falsehoods as he tries to make it as a salesman. Arthur Millar wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949 during the period of post-war boom after World War 2 as a criticism of American consumer culture and the nihilism that arose from people following materialistic desires at the cost of everything else. We see all this through Willy, an aged salesman, poor and unvalued by his company, yet he insists that he is beloved and successful, or will be successful. “America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us,’ cause one thing, boys: I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own” (Miller, 1949, p. 19). Willy rejects metaphysics and any deeper meaning to life chasing success and fortune, and he tries to shape his sons, Happy and Biff, to be like him. However, Willy is a passive nihilist who blindly follows the American Dream rather than make his own happiness. He has isolated himself from his family with his delusions, unable to truly connect with others due to his inability to acknowledge reality. Biff questions Willy and rejects his purely materialistic definition of success to find happiness, his ability to see through Willy’s self-delusion and call him out makes Willy nervous. “When you write you’re coming, he’s all smiles, and talks about the future, and—he’s just wonderful. And then the closer you seem to come, the more shaky he gets, and then, by the time you get here, he’s arguing, and he seems angry at you” (Miller, 1949, p. 38). Happy follows in Willy’s footsteps, believing that all it takes to be successful is the right personality, turning him lazy and hedonistic. Yet he too rejects his father for being a failure and refuse to acknowledge him. The Loman family was unable to face the harsh realities of post-war America, thus rendering their lives pointless. In his book The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote about the Eternal Recurrence, about how, at our loneliest loneliness we feel that all the events in the world repeat themselves in the same sequence through an eternal series of cycles, rendering everything pointless (Friedrich Nietzsche & Kaufmann, 1974). Willy is stuck in an Eternal Recurrence, endlessly repeating the same arguments with Biff and seeing his past mistake, not following his brother Ben to Africa, pop up repeatedly as he repeats his daily routine isolated from his family, colleagues and neighbors. Willy has fallen into the trap of believing that economic prosperity will bring happiness and remain unaware of his own nihilism, leaving him unable to transcend it. As he falls into despair over Biff’s rejection of him, Willy denies his value as a human and sees himself worth more as insurance money. He finds relief and meaning through suicide as believe the money will provide for his family. Ironically, he dies right before his family managed to scrounge up enough money to pay for their bills and his death only exposes more of his failings to his wife. Willy’s death too, was pointless.
The search for meaning is also a reoccurring topic in Hospitality Suite. Phil and Larry are salesmen in their 50s working for an industrial lubricant company. They have set up a social event in a mediocre hotel in order to sell to their client, CEO Dick Fuller. Accompanying them is Bob, a recent college graduate and chemist there to help them explain their product. Phil is an older man who is undergoing a divorce, he is a gentle soul who is questioning his life. Larry is a blunt, smooth-talking salesman who appears superficially confident but deep down lies insecurity and bitterness. Bob is a young and naïve Christian, newlywed and devoted to his religion. As the evening progresses, Phil and Larry could not find their client, their “Big Kahuna” but Bob reveals that he has been talking to their client the entire time, he just didn’t realize it because the man was wearing a different nametag. Bob was also given an invitation to their client’s private party and agrees to go introduce himself and represent his company. Bob returns several hours later, only to tell his colleagues that he never brought up industrial lubricant and talked about Jesus instead. This causes a fight between Bob and Larry, who calls Bob dishonest and proceeds to deny even the foundation of biblical knowledge, pointing out that the Bible is a not a verifiable source of knowledge due to it being written by fallible human beings, “How do you know what Jesus said, Bob. Someone told you. You read it in a book. Someone else heard it. It was handed down. That’s all you know. Period. You don’t know that it’s true, just as I don’t know that it’s not true. Because neither of us was there” (Rueff, 1992, p. 63) . Nihilism denies the very idea that knowledge is possible, just like Larry. However, Larry does not make his own purpose in life and clings to his function as a salesman. Phil is questioning his decisions and thinking about life, death and God. He recalls a dream where he found God hidden in a closet within a destroyed city. Ever since he felt that he was put on Earth for a purpose. He no longer only seeks to sell like Larry, he has grown beyond just nihilism and has begun finding his own meaning to life, even defending Bob when Larry starts lecturing him about trust and the need to leave out religion. As Larry leaves the room in a puff of anger, Phil then calls out Bob’s lack of self-awareness, ‘‘No, Bob. I’m saying that you’ve already done plenty of things to regret, already. You just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done and you wish you had it to do over but it’s too late for that now, and you know it. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you to remind yourself that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You’re not all in that important, in the end. Then, Bob, you will attain character. Because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face. Until that day, however, you cannot expect to go beyond a certain point” (Rueff, 1992, p. 67). Nietzsche believed that suffering is a fundamental part of life and that there is nothing wrong with it. When we learn after going through hardships and suffering, we then become capable of great deeds and happiness. Phil asserts that character comes from learning from your regrets and tells Bob, who has yet to suffer, that only when he realizes his regrets, he will have character. The three men could be the same person in different stages of life, growing from an inexperienced religious man to questioning his faith and becoming a nihilist who only cares about his job, to searching for a more fulfilling purpose as they grow older and wiser.
Capitalism is the vehicle for nihilism to propagate and grow in both plays. It’s insistence on the importance of material goods and success drives people to forgo spirituality and grand narratives, becoming nihilists who fall into despair as material success fail to bring fulfillment. Both Willy and Larry are nihilistic salesmen devoted to their job, but Larry has the awareness that Willy lacks, his honesty making him Willy’s opposite. As such, he could still find success in his job which saves him from feeling meaningless, but because this success defines Larry he blows up at Bob as he sees Bob’s refusal to sell as a rejection of his salesman identity. Friedrich Nietzsche saw nihilism as a sickness for people to overcome by making their own purpose in life; Biff and Phil reject the pure materialism of others around them, actively questions their purpose in life and, in Biff’s case, finds fulfillment by following his own path. Phil seems to be doing the same as Biff, but we never get to see it.
Both plays are written as criticism of American culture and capitalism, showing their emptiness and inability to give meaning to people on their own. The idea of nihilism was created by philosophers, such as Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, as a response to the Enlightenment and its ideas, correctly positing that the idea of a scientific universe will lead to feelings of meaninglessness. Arthur Miller and Roger Rueff are treading similar ground as they too wrote their plays as a response to the capitalist society around them that increasingly commercialize daily life. Both Death of a Salesman and Hospitality Suite contains the feelings of meaninglessness and search for identity that they believe are coming about around them, as exploitation of human beings for profit bring about that same loss of values as nihilism.
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, & Kaufmann, W. (1974). The gay science : With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs : Translated, with commentary by Walter Kaufmann. Random.
Gertz, N. (2020, February 27). If you believe in nihilism, do you believe in anything? – Nolen Gertz | Aeon Essays (N. Warburton, Ed.). Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-believe-in-nihilism-do-you-believe-in-anything
Ismail, K. (2018). Existential nihilism and self-delusion in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Arts and Social Sciences Journal, 09(04). https://doi.org/10.4172/2151-6200.1000360
Miller, A. (1949). Death of a Salesman.
Pratt, A. (n.d.). Nihilism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/
Rueff, R. (1992). Hospitality Suite.
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