Had Willy Loman been this self-conscious, he could have been the king of pop.
The car-dancing, baby-dangling, pajama-wearing Willy Loman.
Self-Consciousness. Self-consciousness refers to how much a person is occupied thinking about one�s self, especially about if one is being observed by others. An excess of this could be called neurotic behavior, or paranoia, or at the least superficiality. A deficiency of this could be called obliviousness, or cluelessness. An average could be either awareness, or security about one�s self.

Willy�s behavior is excessive in this category. Ultimately, Willy is so concerned about how successful his son will be, and whether or not his son loves him, or thinks that he got from him, that Willy kills himself so his son will get a twenty-thousand dollar insurance pay-off. But Willy is not superficial; Willy says to Linda (Norton Intro Lit 1557), �I�m not dressing to advantage, maybe,� which indicates that he does think about how other people view him, but he has not acted on that concern. Willy does not consider it his highest priority that he is finely dressed.
And they were struck by lightning.
When Willy Loman died, only his family and his neighbor came to his funeral.
Capacity for Acceptance. Ok, I couldn�t think of a good singular term for this. But it means what it says: it describes a person�s capacity to accept things, namely, reality. An excess could be described as fatalism, a deficiency could be called denial, fantasy, or a fugue quality. An average could be described as resolve, or resoluteness. The biggest problem with this virtue is that it may be hard to distinguish a conscious inability to face reality from a real mental illness, such as Alzheimer�s or senility.

Willy is generally dishonest with himself and he has a deficiency in this category. As Charley says to him (Norton intro lit 1589) �When the hell are you gonna grow up?� and �Willy, when�re you gonna realize that them things don�t mean anything?� In the first line Charley is addressing Willy�s unwillingness to take a job from Charley, in that Willy will not face the fact that he has no job, and that Charley is his friend, and wants to help him more than anything, and in the second, Charley is addressing Willy�s sentimentality, and how Willy believes that since he named (or believes he named) his Boss, that should give him some kind of leverage. Beyond this conversation, there is the long-held belief, both among Willy, Biff, and Happy, that Biff was a salesman for Bill Oliver, and expect Biff to get a loan from this man on the basis of this completely untrue idea.
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