No man only needs a little salary - thus Charley in the Requiem segment at the end of Miller's Death of a Salesman. He's replying to Linda's mournful observation on her dead husband: He only needed a little salary. He was even finished with the dentist.
I'd completely forgotten Charley's line until today when I was glancing through the play having just marked a few essays referring to it. Not sure I ever really noticed the brilliance of his supremely sardonic observation before. Isn't it astonishing just how deeply Miller saw into and through the bleak illusions of capitalism?
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