Was Willy's Death a Tragedy
...n’t pay much attention to him. Happy, together with Linda, lives in denial and reinforces Willy’s behavior. Biff, Willy’s favorite son, has returned home after a fifteen- year period of wandering about and trying to find himself. He is the only one that realizes the truth about things. This happens gradually, but really climaxes at the end of the play and when he tries to make the others recognize the truth, they get upset at him. They still want to stay in their fantasy world because of Willy. They don’t want him to become upset because of his current state of mind. He has made several suicide attempts lately and they are afraid that if he becomes too upset he will try again and this time might succeed. At the end of the play, Willy succeeds in one thing, his death. He never veers from his continuous delusional thoughts. He had been hallucinating again, seeing and talking with his brother Ben about committing the suicide. In his mind, he thought that his death would be the final chance of succeeding. He thought that his funeral would be grand, because he was so well liked; and the twenty thousand dollar life insurance policy his family would receive would enable Biff to make it big. Would you say that Willy was a daydreaming fool? Or was he a conceited, lying, self- centered man? There are many people who would answer yes to these questions. However, being a health care professional, I work with mental illness on a regular basis, and I am trained to see the signs and symptoms and deal with these illnesses. I believe Willy could have been suffering from a type of mental illness called schizophrenia. Others might argue and say that he was suffering from a bipolar disorder or from alzheimers disease. I would argue these because bipolar disorder is a “major mood disorder that is marked by lasting extremes of emotion. Persons with this disorder go up or down emotionally between mania and deep depression.” (Coon 525). These individuals are usually coherent and don’t exhibit hallucinations and delusions, which in the play, Willy did hallucinate and did exhibit delusional behavior quite frequently. In alzheimers disease, “victims at first have difficulty remembering events. Then they become more disoriented, suspicious, and confused as the disease progresses. As their condition worsens, victims can no longer read, write, and calculate. Eventually they are mute, bedridden, and unable to walk, sit up, or smile.” (Coon 524). Willy actually had a good memory, and still had his cognitive abilities about him. He just refused to accept reality and lived in the fantasy world in which he had built around himself. Many people who suffer with schizophrenia fail to accept and deal with reality. They build elaborate lies and worlds around themselves. The participation of other persons in not necessary for the lies to become credible to that individual, but if others reinforce this behavior, they become a crutch for the individual. In the Taber’s Medical Dictionary, schizophrenia is defined as “A group of related disorders of unknown etiology in which there is a special type of disordered thinking, affect, and behavior. Clinically, patients exhibit disturbances of content of thought with delusions, such as the feeling that thoughts that have been inserted into their head are now being broadcast to the world. Perception is disordered by all forms of hallucinations. There is loss of a feeling of identity, and self-direction may be disturbed. All activity may be disturbed so that the ability to work or carry a task to completion is severely impaired. Interpersonal relations are abnormal and may manifest as social withdrawal and emotional detachment.”(1641). “Some people can live with disease for quite awhile; then they begin to have trouble functioning. The onset of this is usually something traumatizi...