The Company Man by Ellen Goodman: The typical corporate American or European businessperson puts in anything between six and ten hours every day. Phil, the Company Man here, put in six days a week of labor, sometimes staying into eight or nine o'clock at night. The writer might express her fondness for Phil and her distaste for the persona the business world has given him by using the details of his life before he passed away. To communicate her point to her reader, Goodman employs many rhetorical strategies in addition to drawing on Phil's past and the people who have influenced him in the past. Mockingly, Ellen Goodman fabricates a man's obituary who devoted his entire life to his career and the organization he worked for. Goodman employs anaphora, satire, language, and so on.
Always, of course, and type A are examples of inflexible terms that capture Phil's consistency and lack of change. Extreme pronouns like "overweight," "nervous," and "workaholic" portray Phil as a worrier who has no enjoyment in his life. These remarks make fun of Phil as a man who is genuinely consumed with his profession and has forgotten his priorities. When Goodman describes Phil's family, she emphasizes her argument even more by utilizing language specific to business to highlight how important work is to Phil. "I know how much you will miss him," a coworker remarked to Phil's wife Helen. She replied, "I already have," when asked. The reader is told by his eldest son how he canvassed the community for information on his father. When she was alone with him, according to his daughter, they would never talk. When Phil's youngest son reflects on how he attempted to treat his father cruelly enough to keep him at home. Goodman informs the reader that Phil preferred the youngest child. The reader is made more aware of the shorter sentence by Goodman's use of a long, short, and long sentence pattern. The tragic irony in her final line, "My father and I only board here," suggests that he was never truly successful. The Company Man's portrayals of Phil are sardonically critical of how individuals currently live in society. Phil's heart attack propensity, his seventy-hour workweeks, and his egg sandwiches are all made fun of by Goodman.
Overall, this essay aims at
presenting how painful life a down-to-earth person must face owing to the lack
of finance to run the family has been vividly shown. Next, the commoners we
work with in the company have no value after their death because Phil hasn’t been given an obituary from the company
though he works there for a long year.