America as Junkshop: The Business Ethic in David Mamet's American Buffalo

Abstract

The America of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts is a spiritual wasteland, the suffering of its people chronicled in the doleful letters received by "Miss Lonelyhearts," the newspaper advice columnist. Psychologically exhausted by the pleas of his readers, Miss Lonelyhearts imagines himself gazing at "the paraphernalia of suffering" through a pawnshop window, seeing among its accumulated objects the remnants of America's broken dreams. Some fifty years later, the secondhand shop reappears in David Mamet's American Buffalo, not as pawnshop, from which possessions may be redeemed, but as junkshop. In Mamet's play, the castoff objects of American life, including souvenirs from the "Century of Progress" exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair and a buffalo nickel, form the pile of cultural artifacts thatthe shop's proprietor, Don, peddles as junk. Within thejunkshop, Mamet's three petty criminals plan the robbery that symbolizes the corrupted, contemporary version of the American success myth. As plans for the heist continue, it becomes clear that for Mamet the decadence of the American dream is directly attributable to the dominance of the American business ethic.