You know, Charley, I think there was more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made. When he'd come home from a trip or on Sundays, making the stoop finishing the cellar when he built the extra bathroom and put up the garage. And always, to have to get ahead of the next fella and still, that's how you build a future. To get on that subway, on hot mornings in the the summer, to devote your whole life to keeping stock or making phone calls? By selling and buying? To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation? When all you really desire is to be outdoors with your shirt off. I spent six or seven years after High School trying to work myself up, being a shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. Will you let me go, for God's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? And I look at this pen and I ask myself, "What the hell am I grabbing this thing for? Why am I trying to become something I don't wanna become when all I want is out there waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am?" The work, the food, the time to sit and smoke. I see all the things I love in this world. This literary device allows the reader to gain insight into Biff's motivation to confront his father.I run out of that building and I see. Arthur Miller then incorporates a flashback into the speech in order to portray how Biff has transformed since being arrested. These rhetorical questions reveal how Willy's overbearing antics have truly affected Biff throughout his life and thus persuade the audience to sympathize with him.Īt the beginning of the passage, Biff admits to stealing a suit in Kansas City.
Biff asks these questions, such as "Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be?" not for the answer, but to heighten the effectiveness of his monologue. Miller also includes a few rhetorical questions throughout the speech in order to subtly influence the audiences' opinion about Biff. For example, when Biff asks "do you hear me?" and "do you hear this?" he is ensuring that both audiences comprehend the significance of the moment in the office building. Similarly, Biff asks simple questions during his monologue to emphasize his point for not only Willy, but for the reader. This technique allows the reader to gain a better understanding of the severity of the situation.
Death of a salesman biff monologue full#
For example, he exclaims to Willy, "And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from nobody! That's whose fault it is! It's goddamn time you heard this!" The use of exclamation points in this monologue reminds the reader that Biff is shouting at his father, rather than sharing his feelings in a composed manner. The constant repetition of exclamation points helps the reader to personally feel and hear Biff's feverish tone. At the beginning of the monologue, Miller's choice of punctuation illuminates Biff's personal weakness and unhappiness. Arthur Miller incorporates several literary techniques throughout this dramatic monologue in Death of a Salesman to convey Biff Loman's culminating frustration towards his father, Willy Loman.
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