"A Telephone Call" By Dorothy Parker
Writers: Take a Note From Ms. Parker on Interior Monologue as Comedy
Dorothy Parker’s story, “A Telephone Call,” is a black comedy based on a common situation—inside a quiet apartment, a woman waits impatiently for a telephone call from a man she has recently slept with. The action of the story takes place entirely inside the woman’s head, while in the visible world nothing changes from the first line to the last. Because of the ubiquity and clarity of the premise—man pays attention to woman, man and woman have sex, man disappears, woman becomes anxious—the narrative requires very little explanation or backstory.
A Familiar Situation
Readers basically understand what has happened and how the woman feels from the first sentence, “Please God, let him telephone me now,” and so the writer is free to thrust directly into the comedy of the story—the inner ranting and raving and circular thinking and illogical jumps and desperate prayers of a woman who has lost her power.
Dorothy Parker’s Comic Monologue
The first paragraph of “A Telephone Call” ends with, “Only let him telephone now. Please God. Please, please, please.” The indented next line is, “If I didn’t think about it, maybe the telephone might ring. Sometimes it does that.” Readers recognize this thought—they may have had it themselves, though they hate to admit it.
Traditional Black Comedy
What makes the piece a black comedy in the tradition of Dostoevsky in Notes From The Underground and Poe in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the moment-by-moment illumination of a character dealing with a situation that is at once commonplace and unexpected, like a failed sexual relationship, or a death. Each of these works relies almost exclusively on narrative “telling,” that perilous companion to the lauded device “showing,” wherein events are described by a narrator, rather than depicted through dialogue. All three succeed without “showing” because the humor in them is based on a character trapped in his or her own mind, going insane under the weight of guilt or nerves.
Narrative Pacing
The story’s humor is built on daring use of repetition, rapid pacing, wild rhetorical leaps from line to line, and the juxtaposition of pathetic hopes and brave insights, all of which illustrate the crazed thought process of the main character. On page one, “He couldn’t have minded my calling him up. I know you shouldn’t keep telephoning them—I know they don’t like that. When you do that, they know you are thinking about them and wanting them, and that makes them hate you.” On page three, “I’ll be the way I was when I first met him. Then maybe he’ll like me again. I was always sweet, at first. Oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.”
Parker Ignore “Rules” of Fiction Writing
Judging theoretical alternatives for works of fiction is impractical, but it can be tempting to ask questions after reading a piece like, “A Telephone Call,” that so brazenly ignores a “rule” of fiction like “show, don’t tell.” What would happen if the story switched from monologue to backstory in order to create a scene, to allow for “showing?” Maybe Parker would have kept us amused during a flashback, but the story might have lost some of its essential urgency. If the main character slowed down to recall the time she and the man first met, for example, she may have left the panicked, psychotic monologue that is the root of the story, that carries it to the last reckless moment, “Oh, please, dear God, dear kind God, my blessed Father in Heaven, let him call before then. Please, God. Please.
Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five…”
Parker, Dorothy. “A Telephone Call.” Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories. Eds. James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElheny Revised ed. New York: Mentor, 1995. 1-5.
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