Death of a Salesman is a deceptively simple play. Its plot revolves around the last twenty-four hours in the life of Willy Loman, the hard-working sixty-three-year-old traveling salesman whose ideas of professional, public success jar with the realities of his private desires and modest accomplishments. Subtitled “Certain private conversations in two acts and a requiem,” the play has a narrative which unwinds largely through Willy Loman's daydreams, private conversations revealing past family hopes and betrayals, and how those past experiences, commingled with entropic present circumstances, culminate in Willy's death. Realizing that in death he may provide for his family in ways he never could during his lifetime, Willy commits suicide, hoping that his insurance will grant Biff a “twenty-thousand-dollar” deliverance, an extended period of grace. He hopes the insurance money will somehow expiate, or at least minimize, the guilt which he feels for his affair at the Standish Arms Hotel a lifetime ago. The simplicity of the play, however, quickly dissolves into filial ambiguity, civic paradox, and philosophic complexity.