The scene in Frank’s Chop House
Summary
Happy banters with the waiter, Stanley. Happy is flirting
with a pretty girl named Miss Forsythe when Biff arrives to join
him. After she responds to his pick-up line by claiming that she
is, in fact, a cover girl, Happy tells her that he is a successful
champagne salesman and that Biff is a famous football player. Judging
from Happy’s repeated comments on her moral character and his description
of her as “on call,” Miss Forsythe is probably a prostitute. Happy invites
her to join them. She exits to make a phone call to cancel her previous
plans and to invite a girlfriend to join them. Biff explains to Happy
that he waited six hours to see Oliver, only to have Oliver not even
remember him. Biff asks where he got the idea that he was a salesman
for Oliver. He had actually been only a lowly shipping clerk, but
somehow Willy’s exaggerations and lies had transformed him into
a salesman in the Loman family’s collective memory. After Oliver
and the secretary left, Biff recounts, he ran into Oliver’s office and
stole his fountain pen.
Happy advises Biff to tell Willy that Oliver is thinking
over his business proposition, claiming that eventually the whole
situation will fade away from their father’s memory. When Willy
arrives, he reveals that he has been fired and states that he wants
some good news to tell Linda. Despite this pressure, Biff attempts
to tell the truth. Disoriented, Willy shouts that Biff cannot blame
everything on him because Biff is the one who failed math after
all. Confused at his father’s crazed emphasis on his high school
math failure, Biff steels himself to forge ahead with the truth,
but the situation reaches crisis proportions when Willy absolutely
refuses to listen to Biff’s story. In a frenzy as the perilous truth
closes in on him, Willy enters a semi-daydream state, reliving Biff’s
discovery of him and The Woman in their Boston hotel room. A desperate
Biff backs down and begins to lie to assuage his frantic father.
Miss Forsythe returns with her friend, Letta. Willy, insulted at
Biff’s “spite,” furiously lashes out at his son’s attempts to explain
himself and the impossibility of returning to Oliver. Willy wanders
into the restroom, talking to himself, and an embarrassed Happy
informs the women that he is not, in fact, their father. Biff angrily
tells Happy to help Willy, accusing him of not caring about their
father. He hurries out of the restaurant in a vortex of guilt and
anguish. Happy frantically asks Stanley for the bill; when the waiter
doesn’t respond immediately, Happy rushes after Biff, pushing Miss
Forsythe and Letta along in front of him and leaving Willy babbling
alone in the restroom.
Analysis
Willy’s encounters with Howard, Bernard, and Charley constitute serious
blows to the fantasy through which he views his life; his constructed
reality is falling apart. Biff has also experienced a moment of
truth, but he regards his epiphany as a liberating experience from a
lifetime of stifling and distorting lies. He wishes to leave behind
the facade of the Loman family tradition so that he and his father
can begin to relate to one another honestly. Willy, on the other
hand, wants his sons to aid him in rebuilding the elaborate fantasies
that deny his reality as a defeated man. Willy drives Biff to produce
a falsely positive report of his interview with Oliver, and Happy
is all too willing to comply. When Biff fails to produce the expected
glowing report, Happy, who has not had the same revelation as Biff, chimes
in with false information about the interview.
Willy’s greatest fear is realized during his ill-fated
dinner with Biff and Happy. In his moment of weakness and defeat,
he asks for their help in rebuilding his shattered concept of his
life; he is not very likable, and he is well aware of it. Biff and
Happy’s neglect of him fits into a pattern of abandonment. Like
Willy’s father, then Ben, then Howard, Biff and Happy erode Willy’s
fantasy world. The scene in Frank’s Chop House is pivotal to Willy’s
unraveling and to Biff’s disillusionment. Biff’s epiphany in Oliver’s
office regarding Willy’s exaggeration of Biff’s position at Oliver’s
store puts him on a quest to break through the thick cloud
of lies surrounding his father at any cost. Just as Willy refuses
to hear what he doesn’t want to accept, Biff refuses to subject
himself further to his father’s delusions.
Willy’s pseudo-religious quest for success is founded
on a complex, multilayered delusion, and Biff believes that for
his father to die well (in the medieval, Christian sense of the
word—much of the play smacks of the anachronistic absurdity of the
medieval values of chivalry and blind faith), he must break through
the heavy sediment of lies to the truth of his personal degradation.
Both Willy and Biff are conscious of the disparity between Dave
Singleman’s mythic “death of a salesman” and the pathetic nature
of Willy’s impending death. Willy clings to the hope that the “death
of a salesman” is necessarily noble by the very nature of the profession,
whereas Biff understands that behind the veneer of the American
Dream’s empty promises lies a devastatingly lonely death diametrically
opposed to the one that Singleman represents and that the Dream
itself posits. Happy and Linda wish to allow Willy to die covered
by the diminishing comfort of his delusions, but Biff feels a moral
responsibility to try to reveal the truth.
