science” in his work on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; that is, it is an
accepted way of doing work within an existing paradigm.
Looking at the model from a rhetorical perspective invites the questions:
Where are characters? Why aren’t they present? I seek to give some additional
force to these questions by examining the fit between Chatman’s model and a
particular narrative. My choice is not a high-culture literary narrative (sorry,
Jane Austen, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, you have to sit this one out)
but a crime novel set in the Boston underworld of the late 1960s by George
V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970). To be sure, Higgins’s novel has
some significant admirers: Dennis Lehane, today’s most accomplished Boston
crime novelist, has recently called Higgins’s book “the game-changing crime
novel of the last fifty years” (vii), and Elmore Leonard claims he learned much
of his craft from Higgins. Like David Simon’s celebrated television series The
Wire, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a fascinating study of networks—both
police networks and crime networks—and of the way information does and
does not travel within and across those networks. The novel consists of thirty
chapters, each of which is a scene of colorful dialogue. Collectively, these
thirty scenes tell the story of how and why Eddie Coyle, a minor figure in the
underworld, gets whacked by his so-called friends: the transmission of infor-
mation in their network mistakenly leads these friends to conclude that he has
ratted out some other so-called friends, with the result that one of the mob
boss’s favorite men gets killed in a shootout with the police. A subplot involves
the fate of a gun dealer, Jackie Brown, someone whom Eddie has actually rat-
ted out, in the vain hope that his informing the police will work in his favor at
an upcoming sentencing hearing. The final chapter wraps up both the Jackie
Brown subplot and the novel as a whole. I quote the first two paragraphs and
then the closing dialogue between Jackie’s defense lawyer, Foster Clark, and
an unnamed prosecutor.
Jackie Brown at twenty-seven sat with no expression on his face in the first
row behind the bar of Courtroom Four of the United States District Court
for the District of Massachusetts.
The clerk called case number seventy-four-hundred-and-twenty-one-D,
United States of America versus Jackie Brown. The bailiff motioned to Jackie
Brown to rise. [. . .]
“Good Christ,” Clark said, “you guys want to put the world in jail. This
is a young kid. He doesn’t have a record. He didn’t try to hurt anybody. He’s
never been in court before in his life. He doesn’t even have a goddamned
traffic ticket, for God’s sake.”14 • CHAPTER 1