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). Bowman is more a walking sales pitch than an authentic person; he is thus a modern figure in comparison to his foil, Sonny, who farms and is close to his family and community. Sonny is self-assured, capable, and decidedly masculine in the traditional sense. Most importantly, Sonny is loved and not alone—a fact juxtaposed with Bowman’s desperate isolation after years of prioritizing his career.

Though the importance of relationships is a universal concept, the story examines it uniquely through the context of the setting: the American South in the 1930s. Community gathering, family, and agriculture were paramount to the culture—in contrast with individualistic ambition and industry in the North. To further explore the central idea about what happens to a person who idolizes profit over human relationships, Welty uses narrative structure, conflict, and symbolism. Through Bowman’s illness and strange journey toward death, the story evokes a sense of loss—that something has gone amiss in Bowman’s life, but he struggles to pinpoint what it is. In drawing a character who struggles against a fever and a palpitating heart, Welty shapes an external crisis that symbolizes his internal crisis: Both physical and spiritual death are looming threats, but the prospect of salvaging Bowman’s spiritual life is paramount. With this rich dichotomy at play, yet more elements layer the story with texture and deepen its themes: Bowman’s dialogue contrasted against the vernacular of his foil, Sonny; a narrative perspective that is privy to Bowman’s reeling unconscious; and allusions.

As Bowman’s illness takes center stage as an external conflict, other narrative elements gather significance. His feverishness accords with how the narrative itself has a fever-dreamlike quality, due partly to intermittent surreal descriptions. In one such scene, as Bowman approaches the house and sets down his luggage, even this mundane action seems strange: “Stock-still in his confusion, he dropped his bags, which seemed to drift in slow bulks gracefully through the air and to cushion themselves on the gray prostrate grass near the doorstep” (110). The dreamlike quality arises also from a subtle indeterminacy in the literal level of plot action. For example, as the story opens, it is unclear just how long Bowman has been ill, and his memory of his convalescence appears scattered and truncated (the reader later learns the “siege” of infirmity lasted about a month). Among the more dramatic examples of narrative uncertainty, however, is how Bowman confidently judges the woman’s age to be about 50 but later discovers she is much younger.

The protagonist’s cosmos thus appears unfixed, the narrative seldom offering sure footing. Even certain phrases demand unusual contemplation before their logic is apparent—and even then, the meaning may be equivocal. For example, near the end of the story, before Bowman arises to leave the house, he feels that "[h]e must get back to where he had been before” (118). The statement yields at least two possible meanings. First, Bowman may want to return to what his life was like before he squandered it on his all-consuming salesmanship. Alternatively, he may want to return to that very salesmanship, “where he had been before” he encountered the woman and her husband Sonny, who have awakened in him an unwelcome awareness of his emptiness. Bowman’s sickly heart symbolizes his spiritual state, so his eventual cardiac death—and the fact that “nobody heard” those last, stricken heartbeats (118)—could suggest that he ultimately commits himself to spiritual death: an isolated life in pursuit of profit. It could also suggest, however, that even if Bowman now embraces change, it is no use. Earlier in the story, Bowman wonders, “Is it too late?” (113); in this latter interpretation, the response would be yes. Still, Welty leaves it ambiguous.

Though the narrative’s haziness somewhat mimics delirium, it is also ambiguous whether Bowman truly is delirious—or, if he is, to what degree. Even this ambiguity further heightens the story’s dreamlikeness, and it contributes to a motif of disorientation, an element expressed most plainly in the fact that Bowman is lost. His confused driving takes on symbolic meaning as he looks for a town called Beulah but finds himself along a “cow trail” (109), unsure how he got there or where it leads to. In fact, it leads to a dead end at a ravine; in plot event that, like his heart condition, is both literal and metaphorical, Bowman’s driving takes him down the wrong path.

The story’s dreamlikeness also highlights a thematic interplay between the conscious and unconscious, insofar as dreams give voice to the unconscious. Internally, Bowman’s unconscious quakes his mental clarity, breaking through to his conscious with rich yet fleeting images that suggest what he truly needs. His grandmother is at the front of his mind, and he remembers her as a “comfortable soul” (108). She created comfort and togetherness in his life, and he now yearns to get back to a place of communion and full humanity—the opposite of his habitual isolation and fixation on salesmanship, represented as illness. As Bowman’s memories rush forth, trying to convey an urgent message to him, Welty develops a central theme of the unconscious as a truth-teller.

After Bowman’s car tips over the edge of a cliff into the ravine, Welty continues to explore her theme of solitary modern life and the unconscious as truth-teller through motifs that evoke two opposed ways of being: lightness and darkness. Lightness and darkness characterize many scenes, at turns evoking isolation versus togetherness. For instance, when Bowman approaches the woman, she “had been cleaning the lamp, and held it, half blackened, half clear, in front of her” (110), yet when the two sit inside, she hospitably keeps him company instead of completing her task of cleaning. The lamp is therefore left half cleaned, light shining through, and half dusty-dark. Similarly, when just Bowman and the woman sit, the fire is unlit and the home is dark; when Sonny arrives, sunlight streams in, and when he starts a fire, it brings light and warmth into the home. In the light, Bowman later realizes that the woman is in fact young and pregnant. As the fire illuminates and warms the home, Bowman realizes that he is surrounded by love and partnership. In this moment, he is emotionally rocked by the loss he feels in his own life, that of not having created a family when he had the chance. The theme of Illness as a Reflection of Way of Life emerges with new clarity: The couple are healthy and happy in love, factors of their commitment to a grounded lifestyle; yet Bowman, at the end of a long road of a work- and profit-focused life, becomes more ill. He is weaker, and his heart palpitates strongly.

Welty’s use of the third-person omniscient point of view, which affords full knowledge of Bowman’s innermost thoughts and feelings, creates a narrative tension between Bowman’s internal and external conflict. The story follows Bowman as he drives, as he reaches the cliff, as he enters the home and interacts with the couple, as he tries to sleep, tries to leave, and ultimately dies of something akin to a heart attack; throughout, the third-person omniscient point of view allows Bowman’s unconscious to swirl through the story like an ocean wave breaking just beneath the surface. Memories of his grandmother and how comforting she was—an antidote to his loneliness—surface. As the narrative progresses, his inner turmoil comes to a head. He is pained by what he does not have: communion.