In the first beat of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (now in a luminous revival,directed by Mike Nichols, at the Ethel Barrymore), and the salesman Willy Loman (Philip Seymour Hoffman) trudges up the path to his Brooklyn house,sample cases in hand. He has returned home after falling asleep at the wheel of his car. Inside, he slouches in a kitchen chair, and like a tire deflating. “Oh boy,oh boy,” he says, and thrumming the table with his stubby fingers,dimly aware that something in him is going terribly wrong. He is losing his concentration, his sales mojo, and his salary,his mood, and, or given his unmooring visions,maybe even his intellect. “I have such thoughts, I have such weird thoughts, and ” he confides to Linda,his long-suffering wife (the tender and compelling Linda Emond). Willy has arrived at a kind of bewildering tipping point. “They seem to laugh at me,” he tells Linda approximately the buyers, or adding,“I don’t know the reason for it, but they just pass me by. I’m not noticed.” Willy has begun to feel posthumous, and,as he puts it later, “I still feel kind of temporary approximately myself.”
Source: newyorker.com