I also chose this passage because the title is present in this passage. One of his idols is David Singleman, a successful popular salesman until he died at the age of eighty-four. But in this particular scene I realized what his job means to him. I thought he must hate his job and deeply regret not going of with his successful brother. To me he seemed pretty unhappy in the whole book. Because for him it was the greatest career a man could want. The reason I chose this passage was because Willy showed me here why he wanted to become a salesman and what he gave up to fulfill his new dream. Willy doesn’t want to travel so much and much rather work in NY. Willy visits his boss Howard hoping to talk to him about his work conditions.
Willy is talking to his boss Howard in this scene, from act 2. ‘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? Do you know? And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.
And old Dave, he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers – I’ll never forget – and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eighty-four, he made his living. And he was eighty-four years old, and he’d drummed merchandise in thirty-one states.