constitutes his instinctive reactions. Old Nick shouts at, accuses, and threat-
ens Ma, while she first calmly tries to explain and then apologizes. She also
seeks to get past the moment, but he simply dismisses her. Donoghue uses the
juxtaposition of this power dynamic with Jack’s innocent reporting to com-
municate vividly and efficiently the grim reality of Ma’s life and, by extension,
that of Jack’s—and Ma’s extraordinary but ultimately unsustainable effort to
keep that reality from Jack.
The ethics of the telling here is another version of the default mode. Like
Faulkner, Donoghue places considerable trust in her audience and asks that
audience to reciprocate. Furthermore, there is a significant affective dimen-
sion to the ethics of the telling that goes along with the ethics of the told:
the appeal of Jack’s innocence is there in his voice just as the danger and
desperation of Ma’s situation is in hers. Together their voices create a remark-
able combination of ethical appeal and ethical challenge that makes reading
Donoghue’s book such a powerful experience.
This attention to the author-character-character-audience channel and to
its possible synergy with the author-narrator-audience channel invites us to
look for other channels. The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with its thirty juxtaposed
scenes of dialogue, calls attention to another one: author–structural arrange-
ment–audience. In this third channel, the author skips over both the narra-
tor and the characters in order to communicate to the audience through the
arrangement of the narrative’s disclosures of information, including through
such devices as the ordering and juxtaposition of scenes and the placement
of gaps in the temporal sequence. Again, since the author is not speaking
directly, we ought to consider this channel as mediated communication.
In Eddie Coyle’s penultimate chapter 29, Higgins uses the two mediated
channels of communication to recount the events of the night Eddie gets
whacked. Higgins again makes the dialogue the primary channel, and he again
restricts the narrator to the reporting function. Eddie’s so-called friend, Dil-
lon, who has been hired by the mob bosses, carefully orchestrates the hit: he
invites Eddie to attend a Bruins game with him and a younger man whom
Dillon introduces as his wife’s nephew but who is also getting paid by the
mob bosses; Dillon gets Eddie drunk during the game so that he falls asleep
in the stolen car that the kid drives; Dillon sits behind Eddie, and when they
are safely out of the city, he leans forward with his revolver and plants nine
rounds in Eddie’s skull; finally, Dillon makes sure that Eddie’s body won’t be
found for hours and that neither the gun he uses nor the car that takes them
away from the scene can ever be traced to him.
Among the many things Higgins communicates by the juxtaposition of his
final two chapters is something substantial about the ethics of the told. The
24 • CHAPTER 1