30 pages • 1 hour read
Eudora WeltyDeath of a Traveling Salesman
Fiction | Short Story | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Unconscious as Truth-Teller
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). And later, when he sees a red and yellow quilt in his hosts’ house, he is reminded of his grandmother’s “girlhood painting of Rome burning” (111). These snapshots evoke a sense of family, comfort, and care—just what Bowman’s adult life is lacking. Though these memories appear related to Bowman’s compromised physical state—confusion, fatigue, and fever—they also create a dreamlike world running parallel to his reality that acts as truth-teller, encouraging Bowman to recognize what he truly needs (before it’s too late).
Conversely, Bowman’s conscious, verbal mind thinks he needs more work and more profit. He’s been chasing profit for a long time—and has seen some success, being “put up at better hotels” over the years and traveling through “the bigger towns” to make sales (108). Though he has barely recovered from his illness, he prides himself as someone who “in fourteen years on the road […] had never been ill before and never had an accident” (108). Rather than rest and recover, Bowman forces himself back to work prematurely to uphold this version of himself—autonomous, profitable, and tenacious. Readers in 1936 likely would have regarded Bowman’s tunnel-vision ambition as highly modern and his life as one gone awry, especially when contrasted against Sonny’s slower, family-oriented way of life. Bowman’s conscious mind is recognizable as ego, while his unconscious mind holds the key to his salvation.
The Solitary Figure of Modern Life
The thematic solitary figure of modern life emerges most clearly through Bowman’s contrast against his foil, Sonny. Bowman is a shoe salesman who rarely looks up from his work, who never has accidents on the road, and who pushes for more profit and has earned better accommodations. At the time of the story’s publication, Bowman would have been seen as an archetypical modern career man, profiting from commercialization and industrialism. The idea of selling door-to-door and “pitching” a mass-produced product was a far cry from the South’s agrarianism, local purchasing, and slow-paced life. Sonny’s character, then, portrays a more traditional man, staying in close community with fellow farmers and providing for his family.
Bowman’s characterization and development—his illness, emotional devastation, and ultimate death—signal Welty’s theme of the solitary figure of modern life. Such a figure has lost sight of their own and others’ full humanity—they have, so to speak, become lost on their way to Beulah. Where Sonny builds a life around human relationship, Bowman builds one on profit. Bowman is thus isolated; and while Sonny embodies traditional virility, Bowman grows ill and, finally, dies.
Though Bowman’s unconscious has broken through to him in fits and starts through his illness, memories of his grandmother surprising him, Bowman doesn’t acknowledge his desires for connection until he spends time with the woman. Only then does he wish to declare his loneliness—and to reverse it. At the same time, he is unable to fully process the couple’s marriage, and thinks that “some sort of joke had certainly been played on him. There was nothing remote or mysterious here—only something private” (117). He suddenly realizes the sacredness of connection and, when trying to think through what that means for his life, feels duped, yet he knows the simple truth is that he has not lived in a way that yields love. In this, Bowman epitomizes a solitary figure of modern life.
Illness as a Reflection of Way of Life
The narrative shows Bowman growing weaker until he dies. A literal or medical reading of “Death of a Traveling Salesman” could focus on the bodily effects of influenza and how the illness overtook him. However, a literary reading reveals the deeper significance of the illness, which symbolizes the protagonist’s spiritual state.
As Bowman drives, he remembers the worst of his flu, during which he had a “very high fever” and was “weakened and pale” (108). Now, though he believes himself adequately recovered, he is “not quite sure of the way” (108); after he reaches the house and sits with the woman, the “pulse in his palm leapt like a trout in a brook” (112). These details add urgency to the external, literal conflict—he is lost and confused and growing weaker by the minute. However, as Bowman wrestles with thoughts of his late grandmother and his own loneliness, a symbolic dimension emerges: His illness indicates that something is not right with him on a spiritual level. He is not only physically ill but also emotionally displaced.
As Bowman’s inner conflict escalates, so does the external conflict of his physical illness. After realizing that Sonny and the woman are married and expecting a child, Bowman lies “stretched by the fire until it grew low and dying” (117), but sleep does not come. Instead, his physical and emotional crises rise together: His “emotion swelled patiently within him, and he wished that the child were his. He must get back to where he had been before” (117). This is the climax of Bowman’s development. Soon afterward, he falls to the ground. Though his death is not stated explicitly, the story’s title clarifies that death occurs, whether physical or spiritual—or both.
Though Bowman’s ongoing inner turmoil evinces a hope for a different kind of life, the narrative is ambiguous on whether he eventually commits to that hope, and he ultimately succumbs to an illness symptomatic of the way he has lived—disconnected and work-obsessed.
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By Eudora Welty
