Night Call, Collect

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"Night Call, Collect" is a short story by Ray Bradbury published in 1969 in the short story collection I Sing The Body Electric! This analysis is based on an audio version of the story dramatized by BBC Radio 4 for its program Ray Bradbury’s Tales of The Bizarre.

Summary

The story begins with an old man named Barton living alone on the planet Mars. He has been waiting fifty years for a rescue rocket to come to bring him back to the Earth. He is eighty when suddenly his phone rings at night. The caller is himself: a recording of his voice from when he developed a telephone system to keep himself company in his old age in case he was not rescued. However, these calls turn out to be annoying, and, in the end, deadly, as the recording manipulates Barton into exerting himself physically so that he dies of a heart attack.

Analysis

Human telephone operators in 1952

Bradbury adds sinister tones to his story by titling it a “night call” and a “collect call”. The negative connotations of “night” (darkness, danger, and death) foreshadow what will be the consequences of the calls that the protagonist receives. The word “collect” adds a double metaphor: the call is “at the expense” of those who receives it and the call has “come to get” the protagonist. Together, the phrases are a fantastic description about the happening and the tone of the story: a man who is facing a call that is going to take his life.

A collect call is a type of phone call in which the caller requests that the receiver agrees to pay for the expense of the call. Since collect calls were operator-assisted until the 1970s in the United States, Bradbury is being ahead of his time by making the calls in the story operated only by technology. Because the calls are automatic, they are impossible to avoid by simply saying “No, I do not want to answer that call” to a human intermediary. Here we get one of the many themes of Bradbury’s story: technology that moves faster than our imagination, and that could turn back on human beings anytime if it is not well controlled, as has already happened with many human inventions: dynamite was invented by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel in the 1860s as a safely manageable explosive. But then it was used for weapons; nuclear power was created as a source of power, then turned to be a source of environmental disasters; automobiles were created for fast transportation, but are estimated to be the eighth leading cause of death globally.

Characters

The story has two main characters: the protagonist, an old man named Barton, and the voice of his young self.

We meet Barton after many years of isolation in Mars. He is physically weak, tired, and very, very lonely. His conversations with the automated Barton are in a way examinations of his life, and he admits (to himself) that his life was wasted even though he was a smart, motivated, intelligent engineer full of life. He sees his younger self as playful and energetic but also mindless, crazy, and selfish.

The voice of Barton’s young self was helpful, kind, and friendly in the beginning but in the end he becomes contemptuous of what Barton had become. He sees him as boring, weak, annoying, and hopeless, so he begins to make fun of him. For instance, when Barton coughs, the voice tells him that he getting old and sick, and that he is about to die. He eventually plots to get rid of Barton by creating a situation that will give him a heart attack.

The conflict between the two characters and how they see each other reflects a very common conflict between how the older and younger generations see and treat each other.

Bradbury chose to limit the characters to illustrate Barton’s isolation. There are no other people on Mars; even the young Barton is not real: he is the man’s own voice on tape. This limitation of the characters helps the reader feel Barton’s inner struggle. This is how a person in isolation feels.

Setting

The story takes place on another planet, Mars, where Barton has lived for fifty years waiting for a rocket from Earth to come to rescue him. The alien environment helped the author to make the reader feel how this man was isolated where there is no way to find a company and how this isolation made him feel that his life was a hopeless waste.

Plot

Bradbury began the story in the middle when Barton started to receive the night calls in his old age, using flashbacks to remember what he did when he was young so the reader will be curious about what happened and how Barton came to this point, and at the same time wonder what will happen next. At the same time, the flashback serve as memories to allow Old Barton to reflect on his life and to connect back to his present state and realize that all behavior has consequences. In this case, his acts have come to “collect” him. It’s the classic Frankenstein story of the creation killing the creator.

Connection to the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic lead to feelings of isolation in many.

As a narrative of self-isolation and its consequences, Ray Bradbury’s short story "Night Call, Collect” is a significant tale to read during a time of crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic that began in 2019 and put most of the world in quarantine, some of us with our families and many with their own.  As of today, millions of people have been in forced isolation. How have these people meet their needs? Are old people and young people affected the same way?

Bradbury’s story helps us see how age makes a difference by illustrating the conflict between the young and the old generations; between their views of the world; how they see each other; and it connects well to how these two groups nowadays react to the pandemic. In the pandemic, young people are at low risk of being infected and old people are in more danger. As a result, young people do not care that much about what the consequences of infection may be for the older generation but they only want to enjoy their lives. Many are not sticking with the quarantine. That makes old people in the same family house at high risk to get infected. Not only that, but the more people are also out of the quarantine the more the chain of the virus will be continuing. While it is normal for everybody in the community, old or young, to want to meet their needs, we should not let our needs harm other people. A successful community is nothing more than everybody should believe that we all are connecting and affect each other. A young person will be an old one day, and the old person was before a young one.

The pandemic also was the reason behind developing Internet-based alternatives like shopping online, social media, and all the online entertainment to help people on meeting their needs while they are isolated. People can easily order anything they need on the Web and talk to anybody virtually. Will these alternatives be continued after the pandemic and make some people adapt to being in isolation? And how these people will feel after fifty years? This is a second connection between the story and the situation created by this public health emergency. The story could be read as an early alert to open our minds about the consequences of being isolated either by force or by choice. We can see how Barton was stimulated in the beginning by being alone on another planet, which then turned into worry about his isolation and then to a loss of hope.

Some people think that there are many advantages in being isolated. I understand that in some communities being involved in the community may be a reason for suffering more. But that may happen in a community with many conflicts where everybody is involved in others' business. But if everybody who has a different point of view got isolated, we later could have a weak community where bad habits spread everywhere because other points of view have disappeared because they stayed isolated. I think a diverse community with respect for each other where everybody puts the benefit of the community first is what we should all work for instead of taking ourselves to the side and being in isolation.  

Discussion questions

• Do people isolate themselves because they feel depressed, or do they feel depressed because of being isolated and lonely?

• What are the effects of being in isolation? What could the community do to minimize the bad effects of being in isolation?

• Does our home entertainment and online shopping help people adapt to isolation and being away from the community? How is this situation played in Bradbury’s story?

• How do you see the conflict between the young old generations?

• How do you see the future of our kids if the pandemic continues?

Recommended reading on isolation and community by Ray Bradbury

• The Martian Chronicles, 1950.  A collection of science-fiction short stories about the colonization of Mars that Bradbury later organized as chronicle of the United States’ exploration, settlement, abandonment, and resettlement of the Red Planet after nuclear war has destroyed civilization on Earth.
• The Illustrated Man, 1951. A collection of science-fiction short stories connected by a frame narrative of a heavily tattooed carnival man whose tattoos become animated, each telling a new story.
• Fahrenheit 451, 1953. One of Bradbury best narratives, this dystopian novel tells of a future society where books are considered dangerous and are burned by firemen. The story lets the reader feel the importance of books and will motivate them to read.