that Higgins implicitly endorses. Jackie faces the ethical choice of whether
to help himself by informing on his associates or to do time by refusing to
inform. His choice to do the time provides a stark contrast to Eddie Coyle’s
informing on Jackie for a possible but far from guaranteed reduction in his
sentence. Not surprisingly, Jackie’s choice earns the prosecutor’s grudging
respect (“He’s a pretty tough kid”), and that respect in turn guides rhetorical
readers’ own ethical judgment of Jackie’s choice. Clark and the prosecutor are
both doing their jobs conscientiously, behavior that helps each earn the other’s
respect, and, indeed, helps form the basis for their eventual shared judgment
of the legal system.
Higgins uses the dialogue to underline some significant tensions between
the ethical dimensions of the legal system and a broader, more person-cen-
tered system of ethics. It is the legal system that presents Jackie with his ethical
choice, and that presentation comes from an ethical hierarchy that puts con-
victions above friendship or loyalty or just about any other value. In addition,
Higgins uses the dialogue to indicate that the legal system’s efforts to find the
appropriate balance among the various factors that go into punishment—age
of the perpetrator, number of previous crimes, the right to a defense, the right
to appeal, and so on—leads to a calculus that neither of our ethically sound
characters finds particularly satisfactory. Rather than dispensing justice and
moving perpetrators toward rehabilitation, they find themselves keeping a
merry-go-round running.
The ethics of the telling involve Higgins’s decisions to restrict his narra-
tor to the minimal reporting function, to mediate his own views through the
prosecutor and Clark, and to orchestrate the progression of their exchange
in the way he does. Because Higgins positions the prosecutor as a surrogate
for himself and initially positions Clark as a surrogate for his audience, their
gradual movement from initial opposition to concord works in part as the
vehicle for Higgins’s effort to bring rhetorical readers into concord with him-
self. The mediation through the characters is crucial to the author-audience
exchange here: Higgins gives rhetorical readers some subtle guidance but also
invites them to complete the communication through their own judgments of
Jackie, Clark, and the prosecutor, and of the legal system and its relation to the
ethical tasks of dispensing justice. Thus, Higgins uses the surface tough-guy
talk as a cover for his own telling that conveys both a spirit of cooperation and
a respect for his audience’s intelligence and discernment.
When I line up these three salient features of Higgins’s communication—
the telling functions of the dialogue, the restriction of the narrator, and the
ethical dimension of the telling functions—against the standard model, I find
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 17