Nowhere to Hide

To me one of the most terrifying scenes in all of literature is in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman is a traveling salesman who feels that he is largely a failure. His self-pity leads him to regularly cheat on his wife in his travels. He rationalizes as men do—“I have a hard life” or “the affairs don’t mean anything”—and so on. Perhaps his only consolation in life is that his son Biff idolizes him, but one day Biff shows up at his hotel room and catches him with a woman, and it’s just an excruciating scene.

At first, Willy tries to swagger and he says, “Now look, Biff, when you grow up you’ll understand about these things.” And Biff just stares at him. And then Willy tries to bully his son a bit and tells him to forget the whole incident, saying, “That’s an order!” But when Biff finally runs away, calling him a “liar” and a “phony little fake,” Willy falls on his knees, his soul stripped naked of all his rationalizations.

When I read that scene, I just shiver. All of his excuses simply melt away before Biff’s guileless, innocent eyes that can finally see things as they really are. Willy sputters and spins—but his cynicism and self-deceptions and false justifications fall away and he is left there, soul-naked, before those honest eyes.