In "The Company Man,  Ellen Goodman uses an arsenal of rhetorical strategies such as tone, sarcasm, and anecdotes to demonstrate her sentiments towards the main character, Phil, who one of many workers nowadays of corporate America drifted away from his family due to his addiction to work, and also shows how this impacts other parts of their lives. This passage shows how work these days can take up a large part of your life impacting relationships and what is most important to you. In the beginning, the narrator introduces the story with a dark tone, "He worked himself to death, finally and precisely, at 3:00 AM Sunday Morning.  This dark theme persisted throughout the text and also shows repetition. She repeats this sentence three times throughout the passage, emphasizing Phil's death as she constantly reminds herself of the facts that impacted her life. This in turn shows her resentment towards Phil by her inordinate sentences leaning towards her point of anger, while at the same time constantly using numbers to emphasize the fact that Phil was nothing but a statistic: "fifty-one years old ¦worked six days a week, five of them until eight or nine at night ¦overweight by 20 or 25 pounds.  Furthermore, the author uses anecdotes of Phil's family to show how much time he spent at work and how it affected his family, furthering Goodman's resentment toward Phil and what he represents. "A company friend said, ˜I know how much you will miss him.' And she (Phil's wife) answered, "I already have.'  Because Phil was rarely at home and spent most of his time at the office, his family missed his presence in the sense that he was never around. His death is seen as unsurprising by the people who knew him, and they did nothing more than shake their heads when they heard the news. Other anecdotes about Phil's wife and children add emotional effect on the reader. It shows what a poor and miserable life Phil shared with his family. This is