The Company Man Ellen Goodman Analysis

Dying to Build a Life
A price working Americans often pay in order to be successful is their own life. In an effort to make for themselves and their families a better life, they so often get caught up in their wealth, their occupation that gets them it, and their position in that business. They auction off a relationship with their kids in exchange for a higher title. Their marriage is falling to shreds, but that doesn’t matter as long as there’s food on the table. In “The Company Man,” Ellen Goodman makes clear her distaste toward the success-thirsty American culture, and finely illustrates the wage an absent businessman has on his family using many forms of rhetoric.
An impersonal and slightly insensitive tone is immediately established

with short syntax and clever, blunt diction. For instance, “he worked himself to death,” “the obituary didn’t say that, of course,” and “I think that was it.” In the sixth paragraph, she says Phil, the subject of The Company Man, was liked “by most of [his employees] most of the time.” You can easily compare her diction to Phil, when she chooses to use words with such as “finally,” and “precisely,” because they make the reader think of his polished and professional ways. Furthermore, Phil’s impatient, time conscious and deadline dependent nature that Goodman describes as “the perfect type A,” is emphasized by an almost excessive amount of numbers and short, rushed sentences. Her aversion for the over-working American is brought back up when she ends the third paragraph with, “he thought it was okay, though, because he didn’t smoke.”
Goodman uses punctuation to illustrate her point as well. In particular, she uses quotation marks and double dashes. In the fourth paragraph, the quotation marks that surround the words “extracurricular interests” help in creating a more sarcastic tone, pointing out that Phil’s life revolves around his job, and only his job. The word “survivor”in the sixth paragraph is quoted to highlight the irony that any legacy Phil is leaving is being lived on by people he hardly made the time to know. Likewise, Goodman also uses double dashes to bring a new perspective and reinstate her tone to the reader. The third paragraph has the best example of this when she says, “this man who worked himself to death…--on his day off-- was fifty-one years old.” Goodman reestablishes the way she feels about the common working American, and highlights how Phil was even working on his day off.
Goodman’s uses multiple examples to give the reader more of a perspective on how Phil affected his family. In the sixth paragraph, Phil’s wife, Helen, was said to have “given up trying to compete with his work.” She had tried to argue him enough so he’d stay home. The use of words with more negative connotation such as “given up,” “compete,” and “his work,”allow Goodman’s view on Phil to show through. She also highlighted Phil’s self-inflicted unimportance by using examples of the funeral and the days leading up to it, as well as with Phil’s company president’s rhetorical question at the end, “who’s been working the hardest?” His boss started finding his replacement the day of his funeral.