Biff works with his hands on farms, helping horses give birth, while Happy schemes within the stifling atmosphere of a department store. Instead, the urban world has replaced the rural, and Willy chooses to throw his lot in with the world of sales, which does not involve making things but rather selling oneself.īiff and Happy embody these two sides of Willy's personality: the individualist dreamer and the eager-to-please salesman. He does not have the courage to head out into nature and try his fortune, and, anyway, that world of a wild frontier waiting to be explored no longer exists. But Willy is both too timid and too late. He yearns to follow the rugged trail his brother Ben has blazed, by going into the wildernesses of Africa and Alaska in search of diamonds, or even building wooden flutes and selling them on the rural frontier of America as his father did. The towering apartment buildings that surround Willy's house, which make it difficult for him to see the stars and block the sunlight that would allow him to grow a garden in his back yard, represent the artificial world of the city-with all its commercialism and superficiality-encroaching on his little spot of self-determination.
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