Death of a Traveling Salesman

Welty uses a third-person omniscient point of view with access to Bowman’s thoughts and feelings. However, Bowman’s inner world isn’t entirely one-note; he wrestles with himself—back and forth, back and forth in his mind—about what he truly wants. The narrative shows that there are two sides of Bowman’s mind: his conscious, thinking mind and his unconscious, feeling mind. These two minds are mainly in opposition throughout the story, though the climax of his character development is a blending of the two near his death, when he realizes that he yearns for companionship, togetherness, community, and love—all of which fall outside his autonomous and profit-minded lifestyle. The vivid thoughts of his grandmother were in fact hints toward his truest desires: to love and be loved. Welty thus paints the unconscious as a truth-teller, knocking at the door of our minds with information that we don’t always realize we need to hear.

As the story opens with Bowman driving, the narration recalls that earlier, “[a]ll afternoon […] and for no reason, he had thought of his dead grandmother. She had been a comfortable soul. Once more Bowman wished he could fall into the big feather bed that had been in her room” (108).