audience of the Harry Potter novels believes that the entire population of the
world can be divided into two types: witches and wizards with magical pow-
ers, on the one hand, and humans without magical powers (muggles), on the
other; the authorial audience, however, does not believe in witches and wiz-
ards. At the same time, the narrative audience does not necessarily accept the
narrator’s portrayal of everything as accurate, any more than the reader of a
nonfictional text necessarily accepts everything represented as true. Finally,
as an observer, a member of the narrative audience overhears the narrator’s
address to the narratee, even as the degree to which the observer can also feel
addressed can vary from narrative to narrative. Typically, the variation will
be tied to the narrative audience’s similarity or difference from the narratee.
Similarly, second-person narration in which the “you” is both protagonist and
narratee can make all the audiences feel addressed. These points about the
variability of the narrative audience–narratee relationship apply more broadly:
the relationships among all audiences can vary from narrative to narrative,
and some narratives make those relationships crucial to their effects while
others do not.
Beyond distinguishing among audiences, rhetorical poetics makes several
other assumptions about the “somebody else” of narrative communication:
(1) Not all actual readers want to join the authorial audience. Those who do
I call rhetorical readers, and those are the readers whose activity rhetorical
poetics is most concerned with. Consequently, I will frequently use the phrase
to refer to actual readers who have joined the authorial audience. To put this
point another way, the authorial and, where relevant, narrative audience posi-
tions are roles that the rhetorical reader takes on, and examining those roles
can provide insight into the experience of rhetorical readers. (2) In fiction, the
authorial audience position includes the narrative audience position, since the
authorial audience has the double-consciousness that allows it to experience
the events as real and to retain the tacit knowledge that they are invented. (3)
Rhetorical readers can and should evaluate the experiences they are invited
to have in the authorial audience. Indeed, rhetorical readers do not complete
their acts of reading until they take this second step. In the analyses in this
book, this second step will often be implied in my endorsement of the author-
audience relationships I perceive in the narratives, but at various points I will
make that second step explicit, most notably in my discussion of “deficient
narration” in chapter 9.
(6) In addressing narrative ethics, rhetorical theory distinguishes
between the ethics of the telling and the ethics of the told. The ethics of the
telling refer to the ethical dimensions of author-narrator-audience relation-
ships as constructed through everything from plotting to direct addresses to
8 • INTRODUCTION