An Analysis of Mamet’s Play, Glengarry Glen Ross

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Language of Money
One of the striking aspects of Mamet’s play is its language. More often than not language is the product of both social forces and time. And in this case it serves true. The play is a realistic account of the world of business in America and the language used is nothing but the exact same language exercised in the world of business. There are abundant uses of the language of monetization (e.g., incommensurabilities, equivalencies, self-sufficiency). The language of the play is full repeated words related to money such as leads, prospects, salesmen, exchange, buy, sell, sit, deadbeat, investment, company, stock market, contract, robbery, consumption, etc. These are all economic concepts. A reader, in order to understand the play, must be familiarized with such economic vocabulary. Some of these technical terms such as ‘lead’ is explained by Mamet in the course of the play. The fact is that the subject of money inevitably requires the language of money. In every play the characters become important when they are universal. I do not agree with this,
What Samuel Beckett famously held about Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake that “Here form is content, content is form... His writing is not about something, it is that something itself” (27), holds true for Mamet’s work. We observe that the subject of the play influences its form. For instance, in scene three Roma speaks incessantly (when speaking with Lingk) and does not allow Lingk to speak but a few words and then jumps in the middle of his sentences. As a salesman, it is his job to act as such and inculcate so many things to his most likely prospect and this affects the form of the play. The language also shapes the play.
The world that Mamet describes is simultaneously hu...

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