ABSTRACT
Murder is negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent.
The detective story in Glengarry Glen Ross is literally marginalized: the office break-in occurs in the interval between the play's two acts, and the investigation in act 2 is conducted in a room off-stage by a detective who barely appears. Criticism of the play has tended to enforce this marginalization. When noted at all, the robbery itself tends to be seen either as peripheral, or metonymically, as "merely an objectification of the crimes daily perpetrated in the name of business,"2 and therefore as having little significance in itself. It has also been noticed that the crime story provides Marner with the kind of linear plot structure he was beginning to favor, but this too has generally been little valued: "It is difficult to understand his anxiety to work within conventional forms," 3 writes one critic, while another states that in Glengarry Glen Ross "conventional 'plot' . .. is a red herring for a more significant underlying structure of interrelationship between characters. "4
