Comparative Ethics of Shelly Leven of Glengarry Glen Ross and Frank Bascombe of The Lay of the Land - Literature review Example

Glengarry Glen Ross was welcomed by various reviewers as an “outcome of American cupidity and ethics”, as a “sharp…reflection of corruption”, as depicting “American religious malaise”, and as a presentation of the fact that “greed and gluttony are the steam engines that drive North American entrepreneurship” (Quinn 23). In a later cerebral view, Roundane Mathew wrote that “materialism and ravenousness form the never center of the play” and that the novel shows that “public issues” and “business transactions” control “the persona’s secretive world”.

In the Lay of the Land, the importance of this for ethics cannot be hyped. Having strolled for twenty-five-hundred years in a miasma of their own creation, philosophers have now been given an opportunity to achieve not only a fully reasonable understanding of good but also a full pleasing perceptive of the things that are good. The sense of dissatisfaction that has clutched on to ethics with the god will fade away as intellect discover what character has always known, that their things sufficient to make life worth living.

David Mamet’s wordsmiths, such as landed property seller Shelly Levene articulated in monosyllabic words the panic and steep poetry of their struggling lives. Levene’s anxiety (the italicized words) in the novel call attention to the hard-sell core of the salesmen’s lives as they ward off failure in the guise of loss of influence, respect, leads, sales, closings, bonuses, new deals, and even the job. As per Levene, words bring to surface the character’s fear, greed, and extreme anxiety.

Levene jubilantly announces that he has sold some land, which would put him temporarily ahead in the sales contest. But his joy is ephemeral too: his colleagues tell him that the clients, to whom he sold the land, the Nyborgs, are in fact crazy and simply like talking to salesmen (Kissel 212).