The Mad Gray Flannel Suit

                The differences between Tom Rath and Donald Draper are fairly immense. One is stuck in the war in which he faced many horrors; one is embarrassed by a past that forced an identity change. While Rath struggles to find success in the corporate world, Draper views his corporate world as an escape from all else. Although, Rath and Draper’s personalities clash to an extreme degree I think the qualities in which they share are very interesting. They both have a multiple world syndrome; the war, their job and their home life. They have secrets that they feel they must keep from everyone else, and they both look at life with a sense of cynical realism.

                “You’re born alone and you die alone and this world drops things on you to make you forget it,” Draper’s depressing words reflect not only his own philosophy, but that of Rath, “Things just happen…they happen and they happen again and anybody who tries to make sense out of it goes out of his mind” (96). This sense of naturalism engrained in these characters makes them more similar than any difference can account for. But why are these qualities so important? Why is the absence of Draper’s family’s importance in Mad Men the same as the lack of the corporation in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit? Both these characters seem to reject these ideals respectively, yet how can they still essentially represent the same character?

                I think more importantly than these particular specifics to the story, is the general mood of it. If the mood is carried through from one medium to another, can we deem it an adaptation? The two stories are different in so many ways (time period, setting, corporate life, et cetera) yet they contain so many of the same values. Does mood and memory then carry more weight than the actual story itself? Many of the problems I had with the adaptations of the “Mama” stories came from the fact that the mood changed so dramatically over the different forms. What then is mood? How can it capture so much in so different stories? What is its purpose in stories and the idea of adaptation?