sharper sense of his psychological state (notice that he sees the clouds as hav-
ing “fantastic” shapes), even as it stops short of revealing all that he is think-
ing. This mimetic engagement becomes all the more important as chapter 8
continues to its climactic revelation of Gatsby glimpsing an “ashen, fantastic
figure gliding toward him” (169)—Wilson. Nick’s implausibly knowledgeable
narration not only allows Fitzgerald’s audience to connect the dots between
Myrtle’s death and Gatsby’s but it also foregrounds issues of character and
motive as they apply to Wilson. This foregrounding in turn reinforces promi-
nent issues in the novel: Who is Gatsby, and why does he throw his parties?
Who is Daisy, and why does she stay married to Tom? And so on. Given
the audience’s focus on these issues, this reinforcement of its interests either
occludes or renders insignificant its perception of the implausibility.
RHETORICAL THEORY AND UNNATURAL NARRATOLOGY
Before I turn to the crossover phenomenon in Stitches, I want to address the
relation between my rhetorical approach to these deviations from probability
and the approach of unnatural narratologists such as Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen,
Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson.^13 I admire the work of the unnat-
ural narratologists and its salutary effect on the field. This work has called
attention to the various ways in which narrators, characters, plots, space, and
time—all the components of narrative—can be anti-mimetic or unnatural.
Storytellers in the long tradition of unnatural narrative deliberately opt out of
following the law of probability and necessity and other strictures that tie nar-
rative representation to extratextual reality. Instead, these storytellers give free
rein to the pleasures of the imagination, and they affirm the value of explor-
ing what is not possible in extratextual reality as an alternative way of offering
insight into that reality. The unnatural narratologists quite rightly contend that
in order to account for the anti-mimetic tradition, narrative theory requires
expansion and revision of much of its received wisdom, and they have taken
important steps in that project.
With regard to the phenomena I discuss in this chapter, however, I believe
that unnatural narratology and rhetorical theory have some significant dif-
ferences, arising from their different investments in the “somebody else” of
narrative communication. I find it telling that Brian Richardson in Narrative
Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates cites with approval work in rhe-
- See their cowritten essay (“Unnatural Narratives”) as well as the coedited volume by
Alber, Nielsen, and Richardson (A Poetics), and the individual works by Alber, Nielsen, and
Richardson in the Works Cited.
AUDIENCES AND PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES • 51