by Debra
Materially Successful
Character #1
Uncle Ben
Ben, Willy's older
brother, whom Willy knew little about, is completely an imagined figure
in this play. Will tells Charley, his neighbor, that he recently learned
that Ben has died. Because of this, we know when Ben walks into the scene
with Charley, he is an apparition Willy has summoned in his anguished search
to comfort himself that he has done the right things and understand his
life.
From the first time
we see Ben, he is presented as a highly idealized
figure for Willy, whose memory turns him into
a god-like figure. Willy describes him as, "the man I ever met who knew
the answers." Ben is an imposing-looking man dressed in sophisticated clothes
and projecting great authority. He is both fearless and enjoys his success
enormously and constantly chuckling over it. He has an air of always thinking
about secret and important things. He is a father of seven sons.
For Willy, Ben,
who is a man with all the luck, is exactly the kind of person he wants
to become. Even his mistakes become profitable. Ben tells about how he
left to find their father in Alaska when Willy was three or four. However,
Ben later confessed that "I had a very faulty view of geography, William.
I discovered after a few days that I was heading due south, so instead
of Alaska, I ended up in Africa...[W]hen I was seventeen I walked into
the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich."
So Ben is an personalified
ideal success, the realization of the wildest dreams a man could have.
In his quest to make some sense of his failed life, Willy views Ben as
both a guide for finding out his answers and an older brother's role, appears
to him every time he is most desperate. Ben is the inspiration for the
fierce and daring Willy to commit suicide. For several times, Ben says
"the jungle is dark but full of diamonds," which encourages him toward
this action that will put Willy in control of his life, and allow him to
beat the world that seems to have beaten him.
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