![]() and the reader might sense that in dryness, no matter how threatening, is promise-a notion of hope that grows when, in the next paragraph, J.P. Yet at the same time, there’s the blue sky, so both J.P. Parchedness, the desert, felt in the mouth, the swallowing throat. His throat hoarse as he looks up at the well mouth and hears wind blow over it: this is a sense of dryness as a drunk sees it-a threat. He heard wind blow over the well mouth, and that sound made an impression on him. Every once in a while a white cloud passed over. Way up at the top, he could see a circle of blue sky. hollered himself hoarse before it was over He’d sat there and looked at the well mouth. tells about falling into a dry well as a child: on the porch the two smoke, coal bucket for an ashtray, and J.P. All of these nouns, these details, are perfectly naturalistic, but the effect is cumulative and consistent.Īfter Tiny’s story we return to the narrator sitting with J.P. It’s an effort just to swallow then.”Īfter this opening comes a passage that’s largely wet: a fellow inmate named Tiny-damp from a shower, with hair slicked back and freshly shaved face nicked and bleeding, a man who’s dreaming of drinking hot chocolate at home on New Year’s Eve-tells drinking stories at the table as the other men eat scrambled eggs and drink coffee, when suddenly he has a seizure. There’s more dryness a few lines later, as N tells us that in his version of the shakes a nerve jerks in his neck and his “mouth dries up. In this bone-bare opening, Carver begins to lay the pattern of the story’s oppositions: drying-out/ drunk/ chimney sweep. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin’s, J.P. and I are on the front porch of Frank Martin’s drying-out facility. Here are the story’s spare opening lines: I think that this structure of alternation expresses, more than any dramatic action, the story’s main tension and movement. ![]() But just barely visible through the story’s surface of minor incidents, as subtle as the pale bands in an Agnes Martin painting, is a series of ripples or stripes that alternate between wet and dry. What’s at stake, though, is N’s survival, only possible if he surrenders drinking for dryness. A few singular things happen in the story’s present-one of the inmates has a seizure, J.P.’s wife visits-and the story ends, in Carverian manner, with only a slight hint of change. The fellow he talks with most is a former chimney sweep named J.P., who tells N (the narrator) his story, which in part reflects N’s own. Days pass in a sober routine of eating, talking with fellow inmates, being counseled by the proprietor, Frank Martin, thinking about the past and how he landed where he is, trying not to think of the parched future. I first noticed narrative rippling in Carver’s story, where we inhabit the uncomfortable mind and body of an alcoholic-a “wet brain,” his estranged wife calls him-trying to dry out at a facility in (where else?) the desert. Raymond Carver ’ s “ Where I ’ m Calling From ” Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripple or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave: I’m more likely to feel some tension, a small discovery, a tiny change, a relapse. Once I translated the dramatic arc to a wave, I began to think that energy in narrative might also flow in smaller waves, wavelets. This rippling pattern = waves in miniature when you fly over the ocean you see the same seemingly small undulations. Depending on tides, that edge can drop steeply into a fast current of slicing water, or it can be fantastically corrugated, low tide’s repeated ripples creating gentle ribs of sand. Atlantic waves break on the ocean side, but at the mouth of the inlet they keep rolling on, sculpting that edge of the island. A North Carolina beach where I sometimes rent a small carousel house in the dunes meets both ocean and inlet: it’s at the bottom tip of an island, where seawater rushes into a bay.
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