Death of a Traveling Salesman

“R. J. Bowman, who for fourteen years had traveled for a shoe company through Mississippi, drove his Ford along a rutted dirt path.”

The story opens with exposition about the protagonist and the setting. Readers learn that the story takes place in Mississippi (the American South) and that Bowman is first and foremost dedicated to his work.

“This was his first day back on the road after a long siege of influenza.”

The temporal setting—that it’s Bowman’s first day back at work after being ill—creates the external conflict of illness as he travels. It also characterizes Bowman as bull-headed, continuing to push through work even when he’s barely recovered.

“[F]or no reason, he had thought of his dead grandmother. She had been a comfortable soul. One more Bowman wished he could fall into the big feather bed that had been in her room…”

Early exposition sets up both the external and internal conflict. Bowman is disoriented because of his illness, but that disorientation has allowed his unconscious to rise to a nearly conscious level. This tension—between conscious and unconscious, external and internal—contrasts how Bowman is living against how he should be living.