A Following

Whether one is looking at the relationship between the different personae in the poem or at the poem’s relationship to its reader, “A Following” presents communication and interpersonal relationships as highly mediated. Neither Chinaski nor the reader ever learn the names of either of the two callers. The poem instead presents them as disembodied voices, appearing in the middle of the night “to haunt, to startle, and waylay,” as William Wordsworth put it. The poem likewise foregrounds the technical means of communication: telephones; poems and magazines as material objects; an address written on the back of an envelope, and so on. Conversely, at no point does the poem disclose Chinaski or his callers’ inner emotional state. All forms of expression are wholly externalized, down to Chinaski’s final summary remark about lonely people, an extremely general statement describing an outward situation that betrays Chinaski’s reaction to the scene he has just experienced only in the most oblique and indirect way. The overall sense this distancing conveys is that the process of communicating our interior states to one another is extremely delicate, tenuous, and unreliable.