The characters of Willy in Death of a Salesman and Amanda in Death of a Salesman In "Death of a Salesman", Willy Loman believes that the ticket to success is sympathy. He tells his sons, "The man who makes his appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead." In “The Glass Menagerie,” Amanda Wingfield has the same belief. Girls are meant to be attractive and must be attractive to entertain the gentlemen who call. As he tells Laura, "All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be" (1048). It is precisely this belief that both Amanda and Willy try to instill in their children and it is this emphasis on likability that makes the characters of Amanda Wingfield and Willy Loman so unlikeable. Much of the reader's animosity towards Willy stems from his responsibility towards Willy. the ruin of his children. Willy's affair ends up being the reason Biff fails in high school and ends up failing at football. This mistake discourages and destroys the eldest son. He becomes the reason Biff refuses to go to summer school; becomes the reason Biff leaves the house. Yet all of this is the result of Willy's need to be likable. He cheats on his loving wife simply because it makes him feel special, because it gives him proof that other women besides Linda are interested in him, because it makes him feel welcome. A woman "chose [him]"; a woman laughs when he jokes about keeping her pores open; a woman pays him some attention (38). Indeed, it is Willy's emphasis on likability that leads Biff to put his education aside in the first place. Bernard, the friend next door who begs Biff to study for the Reagents, is described by Willy as a... middle of paper... something he has discovered to be useless. They both place emphasis on something that has brought them nothing but pain and suffering and it is this entrapment that makes Amanda and Willy extremely unlikable. Rather than learning from their mistakes and teaching their children to avoid making the same ones, Amanda and Willy lead their children down the same path to failure, a path that Amanda has discovered has a dead end, a path that Willy has not found an end. all.Works cited: Miller, Arthur. Death of a salesman. Literature: an introduction to fiction, poetry and drama. Seventh edition. XJ Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 1999. 1636-1707. Williams, Tennessee. The glass menagerie. In Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, 4th ed. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. 1519-1568.