art of indirection than character narration, since it entails additional speak-
ers with different purposes (implied author and at least two characters), and
since the implied author must simultaneously motivate each character’s speech
within its mimetic context and within that of his or her own communicative
purpose.^2 Furthermore, sometimes that mimetic context means that the char-
acters themselves will seek to disguise their purposes or otherwise attempt to
deceive their interlocutors. In the exchange between Eddie Coyle and Dave
Foley about skis and snow, Higgins motivates Eddie’s speech in his desire to
persuade Foley that he regards the sentencing hearing as no big deal, and
Higgins motivates Foley’s in his interest in letting Eddie know that he sees
through the act. At the same time, Higgins communicates to his audience
that Eddie has a lot of anxiety about the hearing and that Foley not only has
the upper hand in their exchange but also has no hesitation about reminding
Eddie of that fact. Strikingly, however, Higgins depicts Dillon as better able to
disguise his conversational purposes, and consequently, both Foley and Hig-
gins’s rhetorical readers initially remain in the dark about them.
Just as narrators perform three main tasks—reporting about characters,
settings, and events; interpreting those reports; and evaluating them—so too
do characters, though sometimes authors will package these communications
to their audiences with characters’ more pointed exchanges with their inter-
locutors. To put this point another way, sometimes in dialogue the reporting,
interpreting, and evaluating will be direct and at others it will be indirect.
Eddie Coyle launches into his aria about getting the bones in his hand bro-
ken as a way to impress upon Jackie Brown the importance of obtaining guns
that can’t be traced, but Higgins also uses it to communicate to his rhetorical
readers two additional points: (a) Eddie already has one strike against him
with the higher-ups in the mob, and (b) however much Eddie acts superior
with Jackie, he is ultimately a small cog on a bigger wheel, a cog that cannot
afford another malfunction. Jackie’s line about this life being hard is both an
interpretation and an evaluation that reveals his own commitment to the val-
ues of toughness and intelligence. Over the course of the narrative, Higgins
communicates his general endorsement of Jackie’s statement—though Higgins
has a broader view of “this life.” In addition, Higgins also indicates, in one of
his many ironic strokes, that Jackie has himself been stupid for boasting to
Eddie about his deal to sell machine guns and then later letting Eddie see the
guns themselves.
- I am describing the default situation. Of course authors can deviate from the default
for particular purposes, and in such cases, the effects of the authorial disclosure will depend in
part on the audience’s recognition of the deviation.
172 • CHAPTER 9