The Tone Of Ellen Goodman's The Company Man

In “The Company Man”, Ellen Goodman shows her blatantly annoyed attitude toward Phil in the way lives and the way he priorities things. Goodman shows this attitude by using tone, by making remarks to the story, and irony, to be obvious about her bitter attitude with Phil.

All through the passage Goodman uses a sense of bitterness as an overall tone to describe her thoughts of Phil. For example Goodman talks around line 24 about how all Phil ate was egg salad sandwiches and about how he “of course, overweight by 20 or 25 pounds” this sets up the passive aggressive tone for the rest of the passage. Later in the author again game after Phil’s weight, the way he works, his nervousness, and his “type A, a heart-attack natural” these all show the annoyance of Goodman’s tone to the way Phil lives his life. Goodman uses tone throughout her essay in many different ways to convey her feelings towards phil

Another way Goodman shows her emotions to Phil is by making little remarks throughout the essay, giving both a background and bringing a sarcastic feel into the tone. Throughout …show more content…
During the essay Goodman talks about how the day before phil's funeral his son spent the day asking neighbors if they knew anything about his father, the author tried to make the readers see the irony that a son had to go search around to see what he was like, and Goodman makes it clear that this was because phil was more of a employe and had a major lack in being a father. Another way Goodman uses irony is during the funeral when someone said “i know how much you will miss her” which his wife replied with “I already have”. This shows how by the wife's response she already misses phil and she has for a long time because of his obsession with work shes missed him for a while. These examples show how Goodman describes her distaste with phil by showing where he has failed in his relationships with his own