of the story’s progression, the withholding functions as a global tension of
unequal knowledge that is never resolved. Both Morrison and Twyla know
the characters’ racial identities, but neither reveals them. Twyla’s withholding
is inadvertent: she assumes that her narratee knows her race and therefore
knows Roberta’s as well. Morrison’s withholding, by contrast, is deliberate, and
it invites questions about the ethics of her telling. Why shouldn’t we regard her
relation to her audience as the high-culture equivalent of a Mean Girl taunt-
ing someone with chants of “I know something you don’t know”? A close
look at the nature and effects of Morrison’s withholding in conjunction with
Zunshine’s work on metarepresentation (from Why We Read Fiction) and with
another consideration of Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit figure (figure 8.1) will aid
our vision. In this figure, the artist provides signals that can be construed as
forming the image of a duck or of a rabbit, but our perceptual apparatus does
not allow us to perceive it as both at the same time. Furthermore, the art-
ist does not provide any signal that if we could only see better or deeper, we
could determine that the image was actually that of a duck or that of a rabbit.
In other words, just as character-character dialogue is not just an element of
story or of discourse but of both (see the discussion in chapter 1), this figure
is not just a duck and not just a rabbit but rather a duck/rabbit. Morrison’s
ambiguity is significantly different from that of the figure, because she signals
154 • CHAPTER 8
FIGURE 8.1. Duck or rabbit? Source: Jastrow, J. (1899). The mind’s eye. Popular Science
Monthly, 54, 299–312.