Death of a Traveling Salesman

Welty’s “Death of a Traveling Salesman” dramatizes the effects of a solitary, modern life focused more on work and profit than on community, family, and love. While today’s readers may view the narrative’s details—the protagonist’s job as a door-to-door salesman, the house with its stone hearth, pine walls, and simple inhabitants—as very old-fashioned, readers in 1936 would have seen the protagonist as a modern figure, “having given himself entirely to his job” (Jordan, James A. “Dialogue in Eudora Welty's ‘Death of a Traveling Salesman.’” Eudora Welty Review, vol. 11, 2019, pp. 92-96). Bowman’s character is “wounded, self-conscious, cut-off-from-the-world,” reflecting a “modernist vision” in Welty’s construction of the story (Whitman Prenshaw, Peggy. “The Political Thought of Eudora Welty.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, 1997, pp. 617-30).

Bowman is first and foremost a salesman. He has integrated commercialization into his everyday life, believing that his drive to sell will bring him not only wealth but also fulfillment. While much of Bowman’s dialogue is fragmentary and confused, his speech is succinct and clear—though out of place—when it’s “inflected for selling shoes” (111). In one of his more well-spoken lines, he tells the woman, “I have a nice line of women’s low-priced shoes” (111).