Who is the agent constructing these echoes? Given that Higgins makes
minimal use of the narrator, typically restricting his function either to identi-
fying speakers or to straightforward reporting of events, I find it implausible
to attribute that construction to the narrator: such an attribution would give
him a strange and inconsistent self-consciousness. I therefore understand the
echo as constructed only by the implied Higgins. Just as Browning, not the
Duke of Ferrara, is the agent responsible for the iambic pentameter couplets
in “My Last Duchess,” so too the implied Higgins, not the restricted narrator,
is responsible for these echoes in Eddie Coyle. In this way, the implied Hig-
gins is using the resource of his reliable but highly restricted narrator to com-
municate to his audience over the head or behind the back of that narrator.
Notice that these metaphors are the ones theorists of unreliable narration use
to talk about that technique. In this way, the new model, with its emphasis on
the implied author as the ultimate somebody who tells, allows us to recognize
that even the valuable distinction between reliable and unreliable narration is
less important than the overarching issue of how the implied author uses the
various resources of narrative communication at his disposal. I will return to
this point in my discussion of reliable narration in chapter 11. Notice, too, how
this recognition heightens the collusion between implied author and rhetori-
cal readers—how, in other words, it is another variation on the default ethics
of the telling.
(10) While Chatman’s model conceives of narrative communication as
unidirectional, highlighting the audience as a constant helps us recognize
that audiences exert their influence on the author’s deployment of resources.
If Donoghue were to write Room for children, she would write it very differ-
ently. If Higgins were to write Eddie Coyle for children, he would have to make
even more radical revisions. So far, so obvious. But when we add the temporal
dimension to the rhetorical exchange—that is, the way that the communica-
tion unfolds over time—then the audience’s role in that communication can
become even more significant. I seek to demonstrate this point in the next
chapter.
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 29