his lifelong acquaintance, Jack Hill. In the second conversation, we continue
to follow Howard and substitute Amy for Lois as our secondary interest, as
father and daughter discuss why her marriage broke up and what her future
holds. In the third conversation, we cease tracking Howard and shift over to
tracking both Lois and Amy as they discuss why Howard never liked Jack
Hill. Although there is no compelling reason within the logic of the char-
acters’ actions for the conversation between mother and daughter to follow
rather than precede the one before father and daughter, the logic of O’Hara’s
communication to his audience makes this sequence the most effective. In
other words, O’Hara recognizes that the interaction of textual and readerly
dynamics is more powerful with this arrangement of the sequence. With the
shift away from Howard in the third conversation, O’Hara makes his major
moves to give the audience knowledge about events that Howard seems to
have no access to. Those disclosures—that Amy’s marriage broke up because
she had an affair with Hill and that Amy suspects Lois had her own affair with
Hill shortly after she married Howard—add layers to the authorial disclosures
across conversations because they shed retrospective light, and, indeed, all but
require the audience to reinterpret the previous conversational disclosures.
To put this point another way, because the plot dynamics proceed more
through tensions than instabilities, and because the third dialogue is the one
that partially resolves the tensions as it completes the authorial disclosure
across conversations, the readerly activities of configuration and reconfigura-
tion are especially important to the progression. More generally, the sequence
of conversations does not trace a story of change but rather gradually dis-
closes the relation between the present and the past in the service of painting
a group portrait of the Ambrie family with Jack Hill as a shadowy presence in
the background. And the most significant strokes in that portrait result from
the privileged authorial disclosure about events in the third conversation. For
that reason, I shall give more attention to that conversation, but first I want to
highlight some salient features of the authorial and conversational disclosures
in the first two scenes of dialogue.
The only instability of any significance in the Narrative Now is located
in the initial conversation between Lois and Howard—she wants Howard to
attend Hill’s funeral and he does not want to—and it is decisively resolved
by the end of that conversation, when Howard submits to Lois’s repeated
entreaties. But O’Hara uses the conversational disclosures to create tensions
about why Howard is so set against going to Hill’s funeral and why Lois is so
insistent that he go. Although the conversational disclosures suggest that they
speak frankly as they offer their reasons—Howard says, “I never liked Jack and
he never liked me,” and Lois says, “I don’t want Celia [Hill’s wife] knowing
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 187