The Looks of Men
23
If Dick Whitman is what Draper was or could have been but isn’t, Don
Draper is made up. He’s a fiction, a persona via which our protagonist has
amassed a great deal. And by assuming the identity of the dead man and leaving
the farm behind for a life in the city, Draper has become an ideal, a model, at
least to those around him. He has a lovely wife and children; his job is both
artistic and lucrative; his subordinates and his boss admire and emulate him.
Don Draper is by most accounts the workaday Cary Grant/Roger Thornhill cum
George Kaplan. Draper, however, is a real fiction. That is, we cannot say that
Draper doesn’t exist insofar \