finance his business plans. Meeting for dinner at a restaurant Biff tries to explain what has happened but fails to get Willy to fully comprehend. At home later that evening there is an emotional confrontation where Biff asks Willy to accept him simply as an ordinary man. He wants Willy to acknowledge that his dreams of business success for Biff are a self-deception and unrealistic. Willy sacrificially kills himself in a car crash, with the plan that Biff could use the money from the life insurance to fund his first entrepreneurial venture. The final scene is very poignant: contrasting Willy’s delusion that he was popular and well-liked with the fact that but his family and one friend attend the funeral. When the play premiered on Broadway in 1949 it was widely praised by audiences and critics, offering original and forceful insights into relationships in a post-war American economy and society (Sterling, 2002). There are many interpretations of the play: Miller’s ideas and intentions have been approached and discussed as the failure of the American Dream: the destruction of a salesman by aggressive business tactics, dysfunctional family values and intergenerational conflict; the downfall of a man obsessed with money and social status, as well as a critique of the moral values and ethos produced by American capitalism (Koon, 1983). Competitive polarization between the individual tragedy and the political dimensions of the play has created opposing and somehow incommensurable camps of interpretation. These have eclipsed the application of psychoanalytic tools to elaborate on Willy’s desires, thoughts and actions (Mitchell, 1990; Tyson, 1994). A story of consumer (ex)success? Many critics concur that the popularity and resonance of The Great Gatsby lies to a great degree on Fitzgerald’s literary ability to capture the self-indulgence and recklessness of the Roaring 20s’ (Tredell, 2007). Lasch (1991) by describing a culture of narcissism as one focussed on ephemeral hedonistic satisfaction and the desire to live for the moment without a sense of historical continuity or responsibility. ‘Normal’ narcissism helps individuals to direct desires towards the care of themselves, enhancing their instinct for self-preservation. When the condition of healthy self-love is lost it can become substituted by a pathological megalomania, excessive and an unrealistic sense of the self. In Freud’s 1914 essay “On Narcissism”, he admiration
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