BIFF AND NORA
Biff Loman of Death of a salesman is in many ways similar to Nora, a femalecharacter in Henrik Ibsen's 'A doll's house'. Both suffer from identitycrisis and are living in a delusional world, which has been created by thelies that others feed them. Biff is the eldest son of Willy Loman who lacksself-esteem and due to his own failures, he has created a delusional worldaround him where he is a successful man and Biff is an equally brilliantperson. However the reality is quite different. Biff reluctantly playsalong until his moment of epiphany when he intuitively grasps reality andrealizes that he father had been wrong about him and he is nothing but anordinary man. Similarly Nora lives in a world of delusions and considersherself blessed until the day when she awakes to the reality of thesituation and realizes how she had lost such important years of her life,living in a world that didn't really exist.Death of a salesman revolves around the disillusioned and delusional worldof Willy Loman, a salesman who is a tragic figure and consistently misleadseveryone including himself into believing that he was an important man.Biff's inability to connect to reality or to grasp it was solely due to his
He once tells his wife, "I'm the New England man. This kind of thinking has affected his family andmost importantly his son, Biff who himself fails to awake to the gravity ofthe situation until the day when he finally realizes that he could nolonger feed himself lies or let his father live in a world of fantasy. In Nora's case, however loss of identity stems from living in apatriarchal society and just like Biff, she finally regains her identityand this completely shatters everything she had previously believed in. In Biff's case, lack of a realidentity originates from his inability to reconcile himself with thereality. In both plays, authors have focused on loss of identity and tension isbuilt up for cataclysmic endings. This is when Nora realizes how naive and absolutely foolish she had beenabout her husband, her duties, her identity and everything else. Biff is an ordinary person who is probablyas worthless in the capitalist world as his father. For example in a fit of disillusionment Willy says, "After all thehighways, and the trains, and the years, you end up worth more dead thanalive. " This is the miracle that transforms hercompletely and that is when the doll's house crumbles, and out comes awoman determined to establish her separate identity. Similarly A Doll's House focuses on thelife of a naive housewife, Nora, who again has no identity of her own andlives in a world defined and dictated by her husband. Similarly Biff alsoexperiences epiphany and had the story continued, we would have seensomething better happening to both the characters. The husband is not cheating on her andneither is he ever unfaithful to her, but the deception comes from hisrefusal to let his wife grow and develop her own personality. Nora is foolish and naive to believe that her dutiesassigned to her by her role as a wife had been her only objectives in life,it is only near the end of the play that she realizes how wrong she hadbeen and she barely knew her husband.
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Acceptance Essays
