Analysis Of The Company Man By Ellen Goodman

Company Man   

Living a life of work is not living life at all. In Ellen Goodman's critical piece, The Company Man, she attacks the idea of putting work before family. The workaholic in the piece is Phil, a man who literally worked himself to death by spending the majority of his life working, which caused him to be distant with his children and wife. Throughout the piece, Goodman is urging the audience not to work day and night like Phil, but to spend time with family and live a full life. Goodman conveys her sarcastic, contemptuous, and bitter attitude towards Phil through the use of various rhetorical devices.

    Goodman depicts her sarcasm towards Phil with the use of irony. Phil worked almost everyday, from dusk till dawn, which caused him to be absent from home. His family life suffered due to his absence and Phil's “dearly beloved” children only had a vague idea of what he was like. Goodman describes Phil’s children as his “dearly beloved” ironically because in reality, the children had to grab at their father in order to get any recognition which shows that Phil’s work had made a distance between them. Phil’s life revolved around his work so much that he did not have any extracurricular

activities other than the “monthly game of golf” which he played with other people at the company. The phrase being in scare quotes emphasizes the sarcasm in Goodman’s tone because it shows that even in Phil’s freetime, he couldn’t escape his work.
    The bitterness that Goodman feels towards Phil is illustrated by showing his detachment towards his family.

Phil’s wife was “missing him” long before he had even died, because the amount of time he had spent at the office had made his presence at the house sparse. The house where his family lived was only a “boarding” place for Phil, and the sense of home was not present for him. Having to compete with Phil’s work made his wife feel so bitter that she had “given up” when their children were little. Phil’s children had known their father so little that the eldest had to “ask the neighbors what he was like” before Phil’s funeral in order to say anything about him during the ceremony. This first broke the ties between the family as he made work his first

priority.
Throughout the piece Goodman shows her contempt towards Phil with the use of scare quotes. Phil’s dedication to work was unfulfilling to his family because they had wanted a relationship with him, but he never reciprocated any feelings of love and family towards his kids and wife. Through Phil’s death, his wife had nothing to worry about financially because she would be “well taken care of” by the money that his company would give her. With all the work Phil did, his wife had to hide her bitterness so the company people could “straighten out the finances” and decide which stock option would be best for them. This describes Phil as just a form of money for the family due to his inability to be with them throughout their lives. Goodman uses this to convey his distant attitude and how it resulted in his own family only being worried about the finances and not his death.
Goodman was bitter, contemptuous, and sarcastic towards Phil because he was a workaholic who had no sense of family and no control of his compulsion to work. His children only had a slight sense of who he was and his wife had grown unattached to him due to his focus on work. With Phil’s lack of emotion towards his family, they had given up on trying to be something to him.