Where I'm Calling From

The structure of “Where I’m Calling From” employs a time-bending circularity that invites readers to ponder the nature and consequences of storytelling. Lodging at Frank Martin’s rehabilitation facility, patients like the narrator are faced with the feeling of endless time to consider their addiction, their associated feelings of shame, and all the other problems in their lives. For the narrator, listening to someone else’s story is a reprieve, and he describes the effect of listening to J.P.’s stories thus: “It’s helping me relax, for one thing. It’s taking me away from my own situation” (213). The stories offer some escape from the troubling thoughts that hound the narrator, whose inner turmoil is evident in his frequent interior asides as he is reminded of something else. He begs J.P. to keep talking, even when J.P. has shocked himself into silence with his own memories. Though he listens attentively, the narrator does not care what his companion is actually talking about; he declares, “I would have listened if he’d been going on about how one day he’d decided to start pitching horseshoes” (211).

Because it is interspersed with the narrator’s own recollections, J.P.’s lengthy chronicle functions in some ways as a