John’s Phone Symbol Analysis

When the play begins, John is on the phone, seemingly working out a contentious situation with his wife—they are closing on a house, and though the other side of the conversation can’t be heard, John’s wife seems to be implying that there’s a problem with the deal. John finally extricates himself from the call and begins his meeting with his student, Carol, who has come to his office to ask for help with John’s class. Throughout their meeting in the first act—and the more charged, increasingly violent meetings they have in act two and act three—John’s phone rings intermittently and often, and his reactions to the interruptions from his wife Grace and his lawyer Jerry go from agitated excitement to abject despair as it becomes clear that John is going to lose his house, his job, and perhaps even his marriage.

John’s phone, then, comes to symbolize the parts of his life outside the university—his personal and professional relationships, his hopes and dreams, his marriage and his child. As Carol enacts her campaign of retribution against John, she does so with only marginal information about who he really is outside of the university. When Carol submits a harassment claim which threatens to derail not only John’s chance at tenure, but his entire life, he begs her for mercy and tries to get her to withdraw her statement by appealing to her pity for his wife and child, and how her actions will affect them—but Carol will not be deterred. Who John is when he's at work, her actions assert, is indeed who he is in real life. The university is not a separate enclave where John’s words and actions are detached from their real-world implications—in fact, Carol suggests, the opposite is true. Carol’s campaign to bring John to heel for his pompous, contrarian, and casually sexist behavior within the university would be an all-out onslaught were it not from the periodic interruptions from the “real world” through the telephone—interruptions that remind John of all he stands to lose, and reinvigorate Carol’s desire to show John that how he operates within the walls of the university have consequences beyond them.