Goffman's Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: A Review
This paper reviews Erving Goffman's landmark 1959 work, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, examining its central arguments about how individuals construct and manage the impressions they make on others. The review walks through key chapters, highlighting Goffman's concepts of impression management, team performance, regional behavior, and the distinction between impressions consciously "given" versus those involuntarily "given off." Drawing on memorable examples from the text, the paper assesses Goffman's insights into everyday social interaction, including gender dynamics as framed through Simone de Beauvoir, and the consequences of breaking team solidarity during social performances.
- Introduction: The Art of Making Impressions: Goffman's core concept of impression management introduced
- Roles, Teams, and Reciprocal Dependence: Team performance and social role-playing in Chapter II
- Regions and Regional Behavior: Social regions and decorum explored in Chapter III
- Gender Dynamics and Backstage Behavior: De Beauvoir and women's backstage versus frontstage behavior
- Managing Impressions and Team Solidarity: Chapter VI on solidarity, intrusions, and performance breakdown
- Conclusion: Overall assessment of Goffman's sociological contribution
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What makes this paper effective
- The review moves methodically through Goffman's chapters, giving readers a clear sense of the book's structure and progression of ideas.
- Relatable, concrete examples — such as the popular girl in the dorm and the couple behaving differently around new friends — make abstract sociological concepts accessible.
- Direct quotations with page citations are used consistently to anchor interpretive claims in the source text.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates chapter-by-chapter textual analysis, a foundational technique in book reviews. Rather than summarizing the entire work at once, the writer isolates specific concepts from specific chapters and grounds each one in a brief illustrative example before moving on. This keeps the review focused and prevents overgeneralization.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a set of framing questions that mirror Goffman's own inquiry, then addresses the Introduction, Chapters II, III, and VI in sequence. Each section introduces a key Goffman concept (impression management, team performance, regional behavior, in-group solidarity), illustrates it with an example from the text, and offers a brief evaluative comment. The review closes by noting the consequences of broken team solidarity, ending on one of the book's more dramatic observations.
Introduction: The Art of Making Impressions
What kind of impression does a person make upon others? Is it intentional? Is it natural? Is it engineered for the benefit of those who might be watching? Those are the salient questions that Erving Goffman's book asks and answers, and they matter because every day, in numerous situations, individuals are making impressions on others — good impressions, neutral impressions, and unfortunately, bad ones too.
The impressions that others receive are often created artificially, according to Goffman's Introduction. The girl who gets calls in the dorm loves the fact that people hear her name and form the impression she is very popular, even though she may not be popular at all. This is an "impression given off" (Goffman, 1959, p. 4). Most readers will have done this at one time or another, which gives the observation an immediate, recognizable humor.
Many of Goffman's situations are perceptive to the point of being memorable. When observing a person in a new setting, one can assume that person will present himself "in a light that is favorable to him"; yet those observing are likely dividing what they see in two. One part relates to what he says and does, and the other stems from the expressions he gives off, of which he has "little concern or control" (Goffman, p. 7). It is also a two-way street: people observing what an individual projects "will themselves effectively project a definition" of what they are seeing — like a mirror — and Goffman notes that all of this happens without conscious deliberation (p. 9).
Works Cited
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.
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