Webb sites

I really love it when an author makes effective use of “the unreliable narrator”. A story’s narrator is not, of course, its author, although the narrator believes himself to be the author. There’s lots of fun, and sometimes beauty, to be had in that distinction.

One of my favorite examples of this is in the song By the Time I Get to Phoenix by the great Jimmy Webb. On the surface the song seems to tell a very simple story: A man is finally leaving his girlfriend – after many times before of saying he would – and he’s thinking that it will take her some time to accept that he’s really gone. Here are the lyrics:


   By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising
   She'll find the note I left hanging on her door
   She'll laugh when she reads the part that says I'm leavin'
   'Cause I've left that girl so many times before

   By the time I make Albuquerque she'll be working
   She'll probably stop at lunch and give a call
   But she'll just hear that phone keep on ringin'
   Off the wall, that's all

   By the time I make Oklahoma she'll be sleeping
   She'll turn softly and call my name out loud
   And she'll cry just to think I'd really leave her
   Though time and time I've tried to tell her so
   She didn't know that I would really go

It all seems pretty clear, right? The narrator is giving us a very unambiguous message. But Webb himself slyly gives us the opposite message. The key is in the opening line:


   By the time I get to Phoenix she'll be rising

Here we find one of the most potent and compelling of all mythic images: The Phoenix – a great bird that always rises, perpetually reborn, from the ashes of the fire that consumes it.

An author doesn’t just accidentally drop the words “Phoenix” and “rising” into the same sentence. No, the symbol of the Phoenix is only invoked when talking about a cycle of endless rebirth. The narrator himself is unaware of this. He actually believes he’s never returning. But we know better.

And that’s what makes this song so powerfully romantic. A man tells us he’s leaving his woman, and yet something’s not right. He is talking about her in the way we talk about someone we’re in love with – imagining what she is doing each moment of her day, and speaking about her with great tenderness: She’ll cry softly and call my name out loud. The very tone of the language conveys that this man is still very much in love with this woman.

And the kicker is the information that this relationship is a Phoenix: The man who thinks of himself as a loner, a heart-breaking wandering cowboy of American myth, is actually destined to always return to the woman he loves.

One thought on “Webb sites”

  1. if you like the phoenix as a metaphor, i highly recommend eudora welty’s “a worn path.”

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