Requiem: The Last Post
June 21, 2006
LINDA: Why didn’t anybody come?
CHARLEY: It was a nice funeral.
LINDA: But where are all the people he knew? Maybe they blame him.
CHARLEY: Naa. It’s a rough world, Linda. They wouldn’t blame him.
LINDA: I can’t understand it . . . He only needed a little salary . . .
CHARLEY: No man only needs a little salary.
BIFF: He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong.
HAPPY: Don’t say that!
BIFF: He never knew who he was.
CHARLEY: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
—from “Death of a Salesman”
“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
—Pancho Villa
