WILLY (small and alone): What – what’s the secret?
BERNARD: What secret?
WILLY: How – how did you? Why didn’t he ever catch on?
BERNARD: I wouldn’t know that, Willy.
WILLY (confidentially, desperately): You were his friend, his boyhood friend. There’s something I don’t understand about it. His life ended after that Ebbets Field game. From the age of seventeen nothing good ever happened to him.
– Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman, Act 2. Willy had high aspirations for his high school football star son Biff and expected him to go on and be a great success in life. But the opposite happened. Bernard was the one who became a successful lawyer and did far better than Willy expected. This is an example of situational irony. Willy asks Bernard to explain the secret of success to him and why Biff was a failure.