In his staging of Biff's encounter with the woman and Willy, Miller echoes the modern period theme of "the individual". They are obsessed with the self, satisfying their personal needs.
             Biffs has failed Maths and has gone to Boston to find Biff to sort out his problems. The woman is after tights and self satisfaction whereas Biff is looking for company.
             The characters use the personal pronouns, "I", "me" and "you", indicating individuality
             rather than using "we and "us", grouping them together as a single unit.
             The woman describes Biff as "gee you are self centred", again referring to the characters need to satisfy their selves, their own personal needs.
             Willy is the epitome of an anti hero found in tragedies. He aspires to the American dream but can neither achieve it nor afford it and so fails due to his fatal flaw. His inability to accept reality is his tragic flaw. Instead of getting a job, he sleeps in late. Instead of fixing the house that he lives in, he daydreams of building two guesthouses.
             He lies and his pride drives him to dishonesty, cheating on his wife and accepting that Biff cheats in school. To Willy, cheating is a way of life, "didn't Bernard give you the answers?". By not dealing with the reality of what he sees, Willy resorts to living in a dishonest fantasy of flashbacks and daydreams, of what has been and what could have been.
             Without this passage, we as an audience do not know why Willy has fallen, we witness his destruction throughout the play but only find out the cause here, in this passage. When Biff catches Willy cheating of his wife, he breaks the trust that hold the family together as a unit and sets off a turn of events that will eventually destroy the family as a whole and as individuals.
             Biff fails school because he lacks the motivation to do anything ... with himself. Though Happy is ignorant of his...