Dorothy Parker's short story, "The Telephone Call", as well as John Updike's "A&P" both share similar elements inherent to their nature as first person narratives, while differing in the manner in which they use these elements. "Telephone Call" is the story of a woman caught up in an obsession, whilst "A&P" is a coming of age story set in an 50's East Coast supermarket. The stories are quite dissimilar, to be sure, but they also retain several similarities..
"Please God, let him telephone me now. Dear God, let him call me now. I won't ask anything else of You, truly I won't." "The Telephone Call" is a rambling sort of narrative, where the author's inner monologue is sketched out for the reader, so that they can read into her elliptical and repetitive emotional state. This woman, age and other characteristics unclear, is seemingly caught up in an affair with a man at her office. It appears to the reader, as it does not to the girl, that the man has played her, fooling her thoughts and emotions.
"He said he would telephone at five o'clock. 'I'll call you at five, darling.' I think that's where he called me 'darling.'" Throughout the story Parker's girl picks apart her entire faux-relationship with the man, finding significance, all the while deliberating on whether she should take a leap of faith and call him. The reader is harkened back to personal experience of harsh crushes, and most anyone can relate to the fear and neurosis within this story.
"Telephone Call"'s style is unique, in that not only is it a strictly mental monologue, but several times it returns to the same phrases and same themes, such as her counting down by fives until he calls, or her begging God for him to call. The story bookends in some ways, with her doing those two things, but rather than cause you to conclude that those bookends self contain the story, one get's the feeling that they really extend into a longer, never-quite-ending story, which it does.
Language here isn't quite as significant here as it is in other more ethnic stories, but it seems interesting that much of this is directed at God. Virtually every other sentence is directed explicitly to God, as she asks him for both the strength to make the call and the strength to not take the call. Seemingly she blames much of her woes on God, with vitriolic rants against conventions such as heaven and hell and God's unfairness interspersed within the repentant narrative. It seems as though she is a religious woman, eaten up by the sin she knows was committed (which she's managed to rationalize in her head), and much of her sacrilege is an expression of repressed fear and guilt. Either way, we feel by the end of this that the woman is severely troubled, that the man won't call, and that the story's revolving, looping nature would continue it for many more pages in life beyond the ones written.
"A&P" is a more traditional story, unlike the psychological "Telephone Call." It focuses on the young Sammy, a teenage check-out boy at the local A&P. The story takes place at the store in a vacation town somewhere in New England in the 1950s. A group of young girls, one of them distinctly attractive to Sammy, enter the store in their swimsuits to make a small purchase, and when they are embarrassed by Sammy's manager, he quits in protest. Updike presents our main character's romantic plight far differently than did Parker, as Sammy takes action to make contact and impress the girl he's interested in. This is to no avail, as she disappears before he can make her aware of what he did. Nonetheless, it's a coming of age for him, a loss of innocence in a way, as he realizes life will no longer be easy and simple. He's no longer a child.
Updike uses extremely descriptive language to present Sammy's inner mind and his thought process. "By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag-she gives me a snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem." Such is a brilliant description of the old crones, the "cash register watchers", that Sammy has to deal with daily. His mind is further delved into in lines like "All of a sudden I slid down her voice into her living room." These aren't typical methods for descriptions, but Updike makes them flow and mesh into the story as though they were standard devices.
Updike's wonderful prose and excellent narrative drives this story along, and though in reality we know little of the characters, we care for them and feel much of what they are. Stokesie, the immature father of two, seems appropriately sad, and "Queenie" is presented well enough, down to a description of her swimsuit, enough to justify Sammy's interest in her. It's a wonderful, if bittersweet, story of the last gasp of innocent youth and idealistic, adolescent chivalry.
Both stories, "Telephone Call" and "A&P", present differing methods of narrative fiction, as well as contrasting characters motivated by their interest in a romantic ideal. One accomplishes something, if a wasted gesture, while the other is, perhaps, destroyed by it.
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