Sigler 16
WILLY. Then you got it, haven’t you? You got it! You got it!” (Miller 86)
In this scene, Willy begins to hallucinate which we see from the interjections from the
Operator paging Willy but, as soon as Biff lies to Willy and begins to tell him that he did get into
see Bill Oliver, we see Willy go completely fine.
After the scene at dinner, Willy goes to the store to pick up some seeds. Throughout the
play Arthur Miller adds a running idea that Willy needs to buy seeds to plant a garden. Before
Willy completely descends into the past, he goes to the store, buys seeds, and begins to plant
them in the garden. The reason he does this is his kids aren’t growing up to be anything, he
recognizes that both Happy and Biff essentially have no major future. He goes home and begins
to plant something in the garden so that way he has something to grow, he can say that it will
become something unlike his kids. Finally, Biff goes out to the garden and begins to fight with
Willy; during both the planting scene and the garden scene Willy begins to hallucinate and
dream of Ben. He begins to have a conversation with Ben where Willy proposes that he kill
himself so Linda, Biff, and Happy will have money to pay for the house, open their store in
Florida etc. What truly sends Willy into insanity is: “Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake? Will
you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? I’ll go in the morning. Put
him—put him to bed.” (Miller 106) This final speech from Biff has Willy wake up and realize
that Biff loves him: “Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!” (Miller 106). This
makes Ben tell Willy that he should kill himself so he can give everyone his insurance money.
The reason this final speech is so bad for Willy is that even though Biff essentially forgave him
and tried to make good by him, Willy has never moved on from Biff catching Willy with the
other woman in Boston. Essentially, no matter what Biff does, Willy will not forgive himself