Attending to all three points in the loop also sometimes makes rhetori-
cal theory wary about thematic abstraction. For example, some critics have
offered eloquent thematic defenses of Mark Twain’s ending in Huckleberry
Finn, but, while I admire the learning and reasoning in many of these argu-
ments, I find them ultimately unpersuasive because they are insufficiently
responsive to the readerly experience of that section. In focusing on thematic
relevance, these analyses typically neglect the tedium most readers experi-
ence as they slog through Twain’s account of Tom Sawyer’s elaborate scheme
for freeing Jim, and the disappointment they feel in Huck’s ethical decline in
his relationship with Jim. Because this response holds up after my examina-
tion of the textual phenomena of the Evasion section and my inferences about
Twain’s purposes, as revealed by the first two-thirds of the novel, I find it more
convincing to view the ending as flawed.
(5) The rhetorical approach theorizes “the somebody else” in narrative
communication by identifying three audiences in nonfictional narrative
and four audiences in fictional narrative. The first audience is the actual
audience, flesh-and-blood readers in all their differences and commonali-
ties. The second audience is the authorial audience, the hypothetical group
for whom the author writes—the group that shares the knowledge, values,
prejudices, fears, and experiences that the author expected in his or her read-
ers, and that ground his or her rhetorical choices. The authorial audience is
neither wholly hypothetical nor wholly actual, but instead it is a hybrid of
readers an author knows or knows about—or at least an interpretation of such
readers—and an audience the author imagines. The third audience is the nar-
ratee, the audience addressed by the narrator, whether characterized or not.
Typically, the more the narratee is characterized, the more important this
audience is in the rhetorical exchange. Uncharacterized narratees in nonfic-
tion are likely to be indistinguishable from the authorial audience. The fourth
audience, exclusive to fiction, is the narrative audience, an observer position
within the storyworld. As observers, the members of the narrative audience
regard the characters and events as real rather than invented, and, indeed,
they accept the whole storyworld as real regardless of whether it conforms
to the actual world. Two of J. K. Rowling’s inventions in her construction of
Harry Potter’s storyworld can be adapted to help explain the relation between
the actual audience and the narrative audience. In entering the narrative audi-
ence, the actual audience puts on an Invisibility Cloak and apparates to the
world of the fiction.
This point means that the degree of overlap between the beliefs of the
authorial audience and those of the narrative audience can vary consider-
ably. To stay with Rowling’s construction by way of illustration, the narrative
PRINCIPLES OF RHETORICAL POETICS • 7