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

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