What Does Willy Loman Sell

If a writer of prose knows
enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the
writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the
writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it
being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow
places in his writing.
                           -Ernest Hemingway, Death in
the Afternoon

It may be a weakness in
that the viewer is never informed about what kind of merchandise Willy
Loman is selling.may have "omitted" this detail because he didn't know enough about
traveling salesmen and about marketing. As a result there seems to be "hollow places"
in his writing. Miller provides very scanty information about what Willy actually does on his
trips to New England. We don't know whether he went to stores or to offices, or both. We don't
know whether he made appointments by telephone or just dropped in on buyers. And we don't know
these things because Arthur Miller probably did not know anything about such business dealings
either. Miller wanted his main character to be a salesman because plays always consist of a lot
of talking. Dialogue is practically everything in a play, and Miller wanted to write about an
insignificant little working man. A salesman makes a good character because he is used to doing
a lot of talking; yet he is usually a lower-middle-class type with a limited
education. 

David Mamet's excellent play Glengarry Glen
Ross features four salesmen. We know that they sell land in distant states, but the
details are vague because Mamet does not seem to know much about selling that kind of real
estate.