A Following

Fiction | Poem | Adult

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Dialogue and Direct Discourse

Bukowski’s approach is almost journalistic in its emphasis on bare reportage of fact with minimal interpretive overlay. His primary means to achieving this effect is the use of direct discourse—lines that indicate they reproduce speech verbatim through quotation marks. Earlier modernists like William Carlos Williams became interested in the poetic possibilities within the American vernacular, or common speech, to focus audience attention on the actual presence of the world beyond our ideas. Here Bukowski takes a similar tack by relating his anecdotal scene largely through the informal jive and shoptalk of his characters’ dialogue. The use of dialogue not only allows him to present real social mannerisms with a minimum of extraneous commentary, it also presents social relations themselves as they unfold in real time.

Juxtaposition and Timing

The poem’s comedic effects are largely a matter of the timing with which it juxtaposes statements, placing one line next to another without explicitly connecting them. This feature is most prominent when the third caller hurls an insult at Chinaski at just those moments at which the reader is invited to reflect on his status as a writer. For instance, after being confronted about his drinking and confessing to it, the caller lets out, “CHINASKI’S AN ASSHOLE!” (Line 21). Similarly, when Chinaski agrees to fulfill the editor’s request, remarking “I’ll see what I can do…” (Line 27), the caller remarks, “CHINASKI WRITES SHIT!” (Line 28). Juxtaposing these statements creates an element of surprise, particularly if one is listening to the poem read aloud. Juxtaposition also implies or suggests commentary without needing to provide it explicitly. This unstated commentary can become especially rich and multilayered, as we wonder whether the caller is being facetious and means the opposite of his statements; whether Bukowski himself means them unironically; whether the interaction between these two possibilities implies that they are somehow both true, and so on.

Paronomasia

Part of the way Bukowski smuggles in implied symbolic or metaphorical meanings without risking the pretension of high-flown rhetoric is through paronomasia, a fancy word for puns. Paronomasia is a rhetorical device that, unlike metaphor, which substitutes one term for another to connote an additional meaning, uses a single word in both a denotative and connotative sense. The perpetrators of innumerable dad jokes, puns led the critic Samuel Johnson to accuse Shakespeare of nearly ruining his legacy, as when Hamlet remarks to his uncle Claudius, “I am too much in the sun,” sneaking a reference to his birth status (i.e. son) into a remark about his gloomy disposition. Bukowski’s paronomastic terms are those words that seem to carry double meanings, like “voice,” “friend,” and “night.” The poem scrupulously avoids big ideas like “artistic genius,” “beloved community,” and “humanity’s existential condition,” and yet the full import each of these terms carries is inaccessible without some reference to these larger issues. The punning sense allows a voice to suggest something more than merely a speaker at the other end of a telephone line, without ever needing to depart from it being simply that.