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And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. ’Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?
Willy poses this question to Howard Wagner in Act II, in Howard’s office. He is discussing how he decided to become a salesman after meeting Dave Singleman, the mythic salesman who died the noble “death of a salesman” that Willy himself covets. His admiration of Singleman’s prolonged success illustrates his obsession with being well liked. He fathoms having people “remember” and “love” him as the ultimate satisfaction, because such warmth from business contacts would validate him in a way that his family’s love does not. In so highly esteeming Singleman and deeming his on-the-job death as dignified, respectable, and graceful, Willy fails to see the human side of Singleman, much as he fails to see his own human side. He envisions Singleman as a happy man but ignores the fact that Singleman was still working at age eighty-four and might likely have experienced the same financial difficulties and consequent pressures and misery as Willy.
