Dorothy Parker was an American poet, writer, and satirist.

She was best known for

her wit wisecracks and eye for 20th century urban foibles.
The text “New York to Detroit” belongs to the belles-lettres functional style, the
main aim of which is to give aesthetic pleasure to reader. As to the genre, the text
“New York to Detroit” is a short story.
The story shows a telephone conversation between a woman and man, who are
located in different cities. From the conversation it becomes clear that the woman
is worried about their relationship but the guy is indifferent to her. The
conversation ends with the question whether he loves her or not. The man hastily
hangs up and the woman never finds out about his attitude to her.
Talking about the temporal continuum of the story, we can assume that it’s
contemporary to the author’s life. In the story there is mentioned such invention as
telephone, but also for people it was convenient to communicate via letters, we
understand that from the text, for example: “Why don’t you write me a letter, in the
morning?” or “You go ahead and write me a letter tomorrow.”
Direct temporal marker is “You go get a good night’s sleep, and I’ll write you all
about it tomorrow.”
Indirect temporal markers are guests, which we can suppose came to see Jack after
work.
Analyzing the spatial continuum of the story, we understand that the action took
place in the USA, the author’s native country. The main characters are located in
the USA.
Open space markers are absent.
As to the close space markers, they are implicit. For example, we can suppose, that
the characters are at their homes. “Hang your coats up on the floor, and sit down.
The Scotch is in the closet, and there’s ice in that pitcher.” Or “I haven’t been out,”
she said. “I’ve been staying here, all by myself. It’s – it’s sort of better, that way. I
don’t want to see people.”
There are two main characters: Jean from New York and Jack from Detroit.
There’s no description given in the text. We don’t know what appearance they
have, but we clearly understand what characters they have. From the manner of
speech we can understand that Jean is sensitive. She uses addressing “Oh, darling,
it’s so wonderful to hear you” or “Oh, it’s been so awful, sweetheart”. The author
expresses her character with meaningful interjections, interruptions of sentences.
“Oh, I’m not, either, darling. I – oh, it’s just terrible.” So we understand that in the
flow of feelings, she is so emotional and sensitive.
As for Jack, he is dispassionate throughout the conversation. “Oh, hello there,” he
said. “Well. Well, for heaven’s sake. How are you?” The author shows him as
distant as possible, expressing indifference to Jean.
The conflict is easy to identify, it is between man and woman, and the last one
suffers from loneliness and lack of attention, but the clue of the conflict is one-
sided love that Jean has to Jack.
As to the plot structure, it begins from the middle. That’s non-classical
composition. The complication begins with words “Ah, don’t you know my voice?
It’s Jean, dear. Jean.” Then there is development of actions, and the climax is
“Listen!” she said. “Jack, don’t go ‘way! Help me, darling. Say something to help
me through tonight. Say you love me, for God’s sake say you still love me. Say it.
Say it.”. – where are a lot of repetitions and anaphors.
And the resolution is the last sentence “No!” she said. “No, no, no! Get him, get
him back again right away! Get him back. No, never mind. Never mind it now.
Never –” Also, there is framing, which expressed with sentence “All through with
Detroit” said the operator.”
As to the lexical-stylistic devices, there are such as change of prints, affixation
repetition (damniest, loosiest) hyperbole, metaphor, ellipsis, epithets. In general,
syntactical level is in preference in this text.
As for the narrative compositional forms, there is only dialogue speech.