The study explores troubled Israeli telephone talk to explain the functions of figurative clusters (FCs) produced in callers’ stories. Espousing a theoretical framework comprising discourse-oriented institutional conversation analysis, narrative inquiry and discursive psychology, as well as a model of narrative positioning that probes narrators’ co-construction of meaning, it is shown that FCs were generated at certain junctions in the interaction when callers defended their side of the story. In their attempt to sound accountable, they resorted to FCs, remedial linguistic devices that enabled them to redefine their positioning in relation to others in the narrated world and present it to other interlocutors in the ongoing interaction. This finding provides further empirical evidence linking narrative and figurative construction of meaning in troubled talk