I. Introduction
　　The story of Death of a Salesman describes the last twenty-four hours of the life of Willy Loman, a diligent elderly traveling salesman, whose values, ideals and vanity are smashed into pieces by the fact that he is a total failure both in his family and the society.
　　Applying the writing technique of stream of consciousness, Arthur Miller portrayed the typical psychological characteristic of the unimportant man Willy who is squeezed by modern American society to a nervous breakdown. He struggles to survive his psychological crisis but in vain. Gradually, he gets lost in this jungle-liked modern world. He cannot distinguish the present and the past as well as illusion and reality. Ultimately, he has no other solution but to die.
　　II. Willy Gets Lost in the Boundary of the Past and the Present
　　Much of the action actually just occurred inside Willy’s disturbed and faltering brain. Now, Willy is an old salesman, tired physically and psychologically. He is often lost in his recollections. His thought hovers between the past and the present. He sometimes talks about things happening yesterday, sometimes recalls events occurring 20 years ago. In his memory, he sees he drove in New England to expand his selling business and is proud of his throwing himself into the sales career(马可云38).
　　Several years ago, he brought lucrative profit for his boss and built the faithful sales network for himself, and now he plans to open his own company independently at a certain time or at least become a partner of his employer company. But the reality is that he is fired by his new boss, and deprived of a steady salary. And at this time, he urgently needs a sum of money to cover the insurance premium, repairs and the home mortgage payment.
　　His failure life spontaneously makes him get psychological comfort from his son’s success. So in Willy’s head emerges Biff’s image of childhood. He muses the happier past, back in 1928, popular Biff used to polish expertly their red old Chevrolet. Praising Biff’s work on the car, he gave Biff a new punching bag. Biff, in return, displayed a new football, stolen from the locker room. Willy commended on his daring. Biff prided in his father, and he pledged a special touchdown in the football game for Willy. Willy also had great hope on Biff.
　　However, the son to whom he holds too much expectation, eventually turns out to be a quitter and loser. He, drifting from job to job, now 34 year-old, resigned from a temporary farm. And he loses the golden job chance because he steals the boss’s pen in the interview. Biff is jobless and gets so perplexed. Willy cannot understand how the once so promising high school team captain can be so hopeless and worries about the relationship with him.
“Whenever Willy contrasts the present situation of Biff with the past, the emphasis is on his attractiveness, furthering the contrast between the grey present and the green past”(Paine 2). Yet however Willy attempts to make the present into the past and live there , it is just a chimerical struggle.
　　III. Willy Gets Lost in the Mixture of Illusion and Reality
　　Willy cannot distinguish illusion and reality. He is actually schizophrenic. In his illusion, his elder brother Ben and the old salesman Dave Singleman are his models. But the two men both died many years ago. The fact that Willy is unable to extricate himself from illusion indicates his uncontrollable consciousness and his delusive imagination, from which we can see the intensification of his ambivalence.
　　The sense of failure brings him into the illusion of Ben. As to Willy, Ben represents another choice of destiny: adventures, fortune and success, which are reflected in the forest in Alaska and the diamond in Africa. Willy regrets for his not following Ben to establish a business in Alaska. The image of Ben frequently rises in Willy’s frustrated head. When Willy who falls into illusion converses with the sober person in reality, he is always absent of mind and gives an irrelevant answer. Willy lives in his illusion and dreams that he can be a rich person like Ben. He imagines that he can exploit his “gold mine” in his sales career. Virtually, Ben is just the other side of Willy, and the figment of Ben is the concrete embodiment of Willy’s loss.
　　The main reason why Willy does not follow Ben to go to Alaska and choosesselling as his lifelong career may be the influence of Dave Singleman. His dream of success takes shape when he came across Dave. Dave is his idol. “Even he was 84, he had drummed merchandise in 31 states. And old Dave, he’d go up to his room, put on his green velvet slippers and picked up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of 84, he made his living.”(Miller 512) Willy realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. “Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go into 20 or 30 different cities, and picked up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many people? When he died — by the way he died the death of a salesman, hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at his funeral.”(Miller 513) (责任编辑：南粤论文中心)转贴于南粤论文中心: http://www.nylw.net(代写代发论文_毕业论文带写_广州职称论文代发_广州论文网）