myself asking the question that provides the title for this section with even
more urgency: why aren’t characters part of that model?
As I search for a plausible answer, I find myself in an on-the-one-hand/
on-the-other-hand dialogue of my own. On the one hand—let me call it
the right—I can develop two defenses of the model: (1) The Friends of Eddie
Coyle—and other dialogue narratives—only appear to pose a problem, because
the model implicitly covers their ways of communicating: character-character
dialogue is part of what the narrator reports to the narratee, and the speech
tags are the formal signal of that reporting. The model leaves characters as
implicit rather than explicit agents because, in the interests of efficiency and
elegance, it names only the higher-level agents. (2) The passage I’ve exam-
ined, like countless other scenes of dialogue, displays a shift from the diegesis
of narration to the mimesis of the character-character conversation. In that
sense, the passage moves from the mediated transmission of narration to the
unmediated transmission of scene. This defense is the one that I believe Chat-
man would offer, based on the evidence of his discussion of “nonnarrated
stories,” a category that for him includes narratives told in dialogue, and of his
diagram at the end of Story and Discourse, designed to show the similarities
and differences between mediated and unmediated narration:
Mediated Transmission
Narrator-NarrateeReal Author → Implied Author → Discourse Implied Reader → Real Reader(“No” or Minimal Narrator)
Unmediated TransmissionFIGURE 1.1. Mediated and Unmediated Transmission
On the other hand—the left—when I look back at the passage, I find both
defenses of the standard model weak. The defense that the agency of the char-
acters is subsumed under the agency of the narrator fails to account for the
way Higgins’s communication works. Because he restricts the narrator’s role
so severely, because he uses the characters to accomplish standard functions
of narration, and because the ethics of the rhetorical exchange have so little
to do with the narrator’s functions and so much to do with those of the char-
acters, any adequate model needs to identify the characters as distinct agents
of narration. In other words, this defense preserves the model at the cost of
18 • CHAPTER 1