Spring 1994 23 "Always Be Closing" : Competition and the Discourse of Closure in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross Jonathan S. Cullick The language of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross obstructs immediate entrance into the action. The characters interrupt each other, leave sentences unfinished, complete others' sentences, and use abbreviated jargon that frequently employs expletives and invectives. Such language has been criticized for creating characters that are dulled by their sameness in speaking "an endless stream of vituperation." 1 However, the characters' discourse reveals subtexts in their relations. Dennis Carrol notes that the play's language, especially in the first act, does not so much further a plot as suggest a "pattern of interactions" among the characters. 2 The pattern is that of the salesmen closing themselves off from one another in their drive to close sales. Mamet's business office prevents any sense of community by producing a competitive discourse of closure. 3 The office of Glengarry Glen Ross, as with any system, compartmentalizes discourse as either acceptable or unacceptable; each social situation constructs its own form of discourse. For example, Mamet's real estate office is a system that does not value people as individuals, but only as resources for profit; likewise, competitors are viewed as obstacles to be exploited or eliminated. Consequently, the language employed by the salesmen reflects and reinforces these attitudes. In Mamet's real estate office, the most powerful commodity is not land; it is language. 4 Therefore, we can interpret the relationships among the characters by examining how language and categories of business behavior produce each other in Mamet's fictitious real estate office. An examination of the language utilized in the characters' interactions reveals two primary patterns of discourse, which I will call "Discourse of Community" and "Discourse of Competition." The discourse of community is transactional, comprised of speech acts that communicate and invite responses. It is a language of mediation, negotiation, and cooperation-an open discourse. On the other hand, discourse of competition is adversarial, the language of manipulation, deception, and self-interest. Whereas communal discourse is interactive, participatory, multidirectional, and communicative, competitive discourse is interjectional, oppositional, monodirectional, and obfuscatory. Jonathan S. Cullick is in the doctoral program in English at the University of Kentucky. He has an article on historiography and Robert Penn Warren in a forthcoming issue of Southern Quarterly.