Short Story Analysis: Where I'm Calling From By Raymond Carver

Thanks for this summary. I enjoyed your thoughts on the action/inaction conflicy. I had some ideas about the story’s symbolism. Firstly the well that JP had fallen down, can be seen as the inescapability of alcohol. While JP can see freedom, represented by the flock of birds flying over the distant well’s mouth, he’s perilously trapped at the bottom by gravity. That JP is saved by a chimney sweep is no coincidence. The chimney metaphor continues the dark tunnel metaphor of alcoholism that began in the well. Roxy’s almost supernatural power (further represtend by the top hat and good luck kisses) rescues JP from the darkness, and give hope to the narrator.

This is primarily a story of love and redemption, represented in the merciful love shown by Roxy as she returns for JP, in spite of the terrible blight of alcohol that has torn apart their lives. In some ways it’s the ultimate Carver story, starting out like so many of his other stories, placing us in the helpless catastrophe of severe alcohol addiction, but this time seeing us through to what happens afterwards, seeking help, redemption, and possibly the miracle of recovery.

The house painter serves as a contrast to the chimney sweep figure. This figure, who, similarly to the sweep, climbs a ladder, evokes rare emotion out of the otherwise benumbed narrator, who experiences a ‘wave of happiness comes over me–that I’m inside with my wife’ — this is the only moment in the story when the narrator expresses belief in something. In some ways, the painter is the narrator’s analog to JP’s chimney sweep.

Two important moments – 1 when the narrator says “..I think I’d better go back to Jack Martin’s” — this is the rare Carver character who takes action against the disease. JP has the strength that Carver wishes he had. This is later confirmed when Roxy asks JP to leave for lunch and JP insists on staying the course of the program, passing a test that narrator likely would have failed.

2 – ‘who knows why we do what we do? — his drinking picks up’ — this quote underlines the insidious nature of the disease, that needs no reason to invade lives, but just like cancer (another metaphor in the pap smear) comes unbidden and unpreventable, rendering us completely vulnerable to its clutches. This underlines Carver’s powerlessness to the disease.

But on the other side, the story’s presence of Jack London, whom Carver idolized, represents the Icarus-like toxic path of the artist unreservedly given to self-sacrifice, something that has plagued artists for all time, in pursuit of art, drawing him ever further down the well. London’s story of life or death reminds us of the dire reality of Carver’s disease, and delicate nature of the fire in it relates to the chimney metaphor, being the spark of hope that Roxy has kindled with JP, and that may or may not be extinguished in the narrator’s (Carver’s) future.