Christopher McDonald
Words: 758
Student ID: 13164570

Lynne Tillman’s ‘Hung up’, written in 1984, begins with a rather ambiguous opening paragraph explaining the details of a situation between two people, whose relationship is equally ambiguous and describes the current situation of the narrator. The narrator, seemingly a young woman, likely by position she is in, perhaps a woman preparing for the move with her ‘friend’.
The narrator tells the story in first person, and the prose suggests the narration are her thoughts as the events of the situation are unfolding. Narrators in this position, as the situation is happening to them have no outer knowledge or context outside the immediate surroundings around them and what they can clearly perceive. The story begins by focusing on the overall situation explaining that the narrator was on the cusp on moving and living with a man, she refers to as her friend, simply put. “We were about to move. The next day in fact”. From the situation the reader is given insight into what the situation entails and leads the reader to believe what the narrator perceives and understands as the situation, that the narrator expects a certain commitment from the man as they live together. “I’d heard that signing a lease together, moving together, was a form of recommitment, a modern marriage of sorts”. After the narrator begins to worry about the man, after trying a number of times to call him, she begins to worry due to his lack of response during the first phone call. “Perhaps I’d been too demanding in the first phone call”, shifting the focus of the text to the narrator’s immediate feelings and thoughts in that moment. At this point the reader knows nothing more about the situation aside from the narrator’s feelings towards what she can perceive. Tillman does this by moving to the narrator’s inner dialogue rather than a third person recount of the situation as at the beginning of the text. “We were about to move. The next day, in fact. Which I think gives one some right to be deranged” shifted to a more direct first person narration, “Why was he doing this to me? I dialled again.”
When Tillman does this she allows the reader to be empathetic to the situation and take on the standpoint of the narrator and better relate to how she is feeling. This creates a feeling of connection in the reader, as they can’t know or perceive any more of the current situation than the narrator. “There might be some other explanation. It didn’t seem likely, though.”, the reader can then relate to the character better in understanding the panic the narrator is in. She goes to the worst possible outcome rather than rationalising and the reader has no more to go on that she does not, “He didn’t want to move with me”.
The story doesn’t give a clear ending to the situation the two characters are