As we age we learn to overcome obstacles, how to succeed, and how to roll with the punches at times that failure beats at our door. Miller's salesman just doesn't get it about taking responsibility for one's own life, being a man without being a whiny victim, setting a high moral example for his family, savoring the benefits that love and fidelity produce, and living according to a higher moral code that has little to do with material success.
This play, like alot of his other work, is a superb reflection of the malaise of the country at the time it was written. It's of Miller's time and not necessarily time-less. It's a downer and Miller's attitude in alot of interviews seemed pessimistic. The Crucible was a manipulation of the details of the Salem Witch Trials as well as the McCarthy hearings (according to Ann Coulter's reporting). After the Fall seemed like a betrayal of his marital intimacy with Monroe.
Miller didn't seem like a positive person. If that negativism is "like the rest of us", I treasure not being one of the crowd.
Now after many years, when youth's limitless possibilities have been transformed by life's reality, the play still appears so cramped and ill-conceived. [I feel the play's attraction for the young is only in the vein of youth seeing the conventional occupations as not for them. You cant affirm the Salesman's POV unless you see yourself as Other than the conventional. This is the perogative of rebellious youth.] The tragedy in the play was the narrowness of vision in which the family operated. It is definitely claustrophobic. It is art only in the sense that it depicts that narrowness of life. The alternative wider vision is withheld in the play and thereby the author skates by and can pose as one who may know something better as he condemns the fish in the barrel.
I think that it is not surprising at all that Miller appears to be the narrow, self-obsessed sad human being that he now is shown to have been. [See the Terry Teachout obit which is counters the MSM honoraria]
I like the way you juxtaposed responsibility for self and morality as points of view absent from the worldview which miller portrayed as his target in Salesman. You are right on when you state that self-pitying whinning appears to be the essence of the play.
My most favorite actor and a total political opposite, Jack Lemmon, made Wiilie Loman look like a Brownie in Glengarry Glen Ross.
The traveling salesman was the estranged father of our hide-bound moral past; today, he's the purple-clad pimp in the gold-wheeled Caddy at the old Motel 6 just past the antebellum Catholic church at the end of Broad Street.