42 pages • 1 hour read
David MametGlengarry Glen Ross
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1983A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Shelley Levene
Levene is an older, past-his-prime salesman who brags that he was once successful enough to put his daughter through college, though he is now so broke that he can’t pay his own check for dinner. Levene lives in a hotel, and he references his daughter as a reason for Williamson take pity and give him leads, suggesting that he is helping to support her. His anger and bitterness constantly show through, undermining his appeals for sympathy. Of all the characters in this ensemble cast, Levene is the one who most closely mirrors Willy Loman, the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Levene’s tragedy of the common man arises because he simply can’t support his family by selling anymore, and his downfall is a result of his excessive pride. Levene burglarizes the office, and when Williamson catches him in a lie, he gives his name to the detective because, as he says, he doesn’t like Levene, likely because Levene has repeatedly berated and belittled Williamson out of a belief that being a salesman makes him better and more of a man, even when he isn’t selling. The big sale that Levene brags about to Roma is an act of coercion, and he describes with relish how he manipulated and bullied his clients into signing. But like Roma’s sale to Lingk, it’s not a given that the sale will stick. Levene is the product of capitalist conditioning as his self-worth and masculinity are so dependent on closing sales that he becomes a criminal before considering changing careers.
Dave Moss
According to Williamson, Moss is the second-best salesman in the office, but that doesn’t mean very much since, as Roma reveals, Moss hasn’t closed a sale in a month. Moss concocts the plot to steal the leads from the office and sell them to Jerry Graff, but he schemes to take advantage of one of his two more desperate colleagues by enlisting Aaronow or Levene to carry out the dirty work for half the financial reward. Moss’s sales tactics, as demonstrated on Aaronow, are clumsy and ultimately ineffectual. Moss “sells” Aaronow on committing the robbery by attempting to convince him that he is trapped and has no choice, a strategy similar to the one Roma uses to trap Lingk and the one Levene describes in his big sale. At the end of the second act, it becomes apparent that Aaronow backed out and Levene, the most desperate of all of them, stepped in. Moss plays it safe, constructing an alibi for himself when he doesn’t even intend to be present at the robbery, and presumably convincing Levene to carry it out before he can change his mind. He even gives himself a much bigger cut for taking very little risk. in Act II, Moss manages to get his interrogation over with first and then fabricate outrage as his excuse to get out of the office and avoid self-incrimination. Moss is only looking out for his own best interests, and although Levene refuses to give his name, Moss undoubtedly wouldn’t give Levene the same protection.
George Aaronow
Like Levene, Aaronow is lagging in one of the last two places in the sales contest, and in Act I, he has just failed to close another sale. Of the four salesmen, Aaronow is the only one who doesn’t appear to use manipulation and coercion to control his clients or his colleagues. In the second act, Aaronow appears anxious, presumably because he’s afraid he’ll be caught for carrying out the robbery. He mirrors Moss’s outrage at Baylen’s questions until he is told to go home. But it soon becomes clear that Levene stepped in to rob the office, meaning that after his scene with Moss in Act I, Aaronow managed to say no. Aaronow seems to have the most integrity of the salesmen. He isn’t interested in being a criminal, but he doesn’t give Moss away to the police. If the sales contest continues after the robbery, Aaronow will probably lose his job. That Moss has both the most personal integrity and the least success of the sales team suggests an inverse relationship between these two qualities.
Richard Roma
Roma is the best salesman in the office—a dubious distinction given the murky ethics of the sales team’s work. In Act I, he is the embodiment of the phrase “Always be closing.” He talks to Lingk about hope and fear, about food, about sex—anything other than the property he wants to sell. By the time he makes the actual pitch (which the audience doesn’t see), he has Lingk so spellbound that he seems ready to acquiesce to anything. In the first act, Roma seems bolstered by his own success, displaying ease and confidence that the others, who are scrambling for sales, don’t have. But in the second act, Roma reveals that he is no less highly strung or aggressive than his colleagues, and he shows himself to be a con artist on multiple levels. When Roma sees Lingk approaching the office, he knows that his sale is in trouble. He has no qualms about lying to Lingk to prevent him from backing out of the sale. Roma’s actions reveal that the ethos of “always be closing” (72) extends beyond the act of selling, as he employs his manipulation tactics on not only his clients, but on his fellow salesmen as well. Roma takes a sudden interest in Levene when Levene comes in with a big sale, realizing that he might be able to use Levene for income. Roma knows exactly what to say to make Levene feel special, and it becomes apparent when Levene is out of the room that he plans to take half of his commissions. When a sale is interrupted, Roma flies into a rage, as when Williamson casually reveals his lie to Lingk. Roma has no connection to the robbery, so he will likely survive another day as the continued top salesman, but his arrogance is perhaps setting him up for an eventual larger fall.
John Williamson
Williamson manages the real estate office and assigns leads to the salesmen based on the instructions handed down from Mitch and Murray, which means giving the most promising leads to the salesmen with the best sales records. The salesmen see him as an adversary, though his real role is to manipulate and exacerbate the adversarial relationships between the salesmen. By assigning the good leads to the top performers, he perpetuates a winner-take-all system in which success begets more success and failure begets more failure. Williamson accepts all the abuse the salesmen wish they could hurl at the owners of the firm, Mitch and Murray, who are frequently spoken of but never actually appear on stage. These men take most of the profit of the salesmen’s hard work while making them clamor against each other in a demeaning sales contest. The salesmen insult Williamson and call him less of a man for never having been in sales. They accuse him of being unfit for his job, but perhaps his ability to remain stoic in the face of abuse makes him highly fit for the job of managing such volatile personalities. In Act I, he appears to consider Levene’s offer of a bribe for better leads, but then he refuses unless Levene can give him a hundred on the spot. In the second act, Williamson ruins Roma’s sale to Lingk by telling him that he deposited his check. In both of these situations, it is up to the director and the actor to make a choice about Williamson’s motivations. It may be that is simply fallible, or it may be that he is maintaining plausible deniability while striking back at the two salesmen who have been egregiously nasty to him. Perhaps he was leading Levene along and giving him false hope, knowing full well that Levene is broke. And while Roma is trying to persuade Lingk that Monday will be within his three-day grace period, Williamson interrupts to reassure him that the check was cashed, despite the fact that the undeposited check is the smoking gun that nails Levene. Was Williamson trying to be helpful? Or was this an opportunity to take revenge on Roma?
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