and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. In chapter 4, I continue the
probability chain, even as I bring in a resource I call stubbornness—a tex-
tual phenomenon that won’t yield to interpretive mastery but nevertheless
contributes to the effectiveness of a narrative. To come to terms with Franz
Kafka’s use of stubbornness in his remarkable short story, “Das Urteil,” I also
examine his use of other resources, especially narrative speed and progression
toward a surprise ending.
Chapters 5–13 depart from the probability link and fashion links focused
on authors telling audiences by means of (a) character narrators telling nar-
ratees and (b) characters telling/talking to each other. This section of the book
draws on and deepens the work I began in Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric
and Ethics of Character Narration. But this section also widens the scope of
rhetorical poetics, and I discuss other issues, including ambiguity and occa-
sion, as I take up some connections between the project of rhetorical poetics
and those of other approaches.
Chapter 5 itself focuses on how an author can use the same resource in the
service of radically different ends as it posits a spectrum of unreliability that
runs from estranging to bonding effects between narrators and audiences. It
then deploys the spectrum in an examination of the ethics of the telling in
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. In chapter 6, I continue forging character nar-
ration links, as I examine Martin Amis’s handling of “backwards narration”
(telling that proceeds in reverse temporal order) in Time’s Arrow and its con-
sequences for the ethics and aesthetics of Amis’s rhetorical communication.
In chapter 7, I form the next link in the character narrator chain by analyz-
ing Joseph Conrad’s handling of his participant-observer narrator Marlow in
Lord Jim and how Conrad uses Marlow’s telling as part of the construction
of a different kind of stubbornness than I examined in “Das Urteil,” this one
focused on the protagonist himself. In chapter 8, the ambiguity/stubborn-
ness chain gets further developed along with the character narrator chain,
as I examine the interaction between the two resources in Toni Morrison’s
“Recitatif.” In this chapter, I also situate rhetorical poetics in relation to cog-
nitive narratology, since Morrison’s story lends itself to illumination by both
approaches.
In chapter 9, the character narration link moves back to the front and
center of my theory construction, as I develop an account of what I call defi-
cient narration (telling that leads the actual audience to resist entering the
authorial audience) through a return to Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking and
a look at Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. In chap-
ter 10, I switch the focus to character-character dialogue and pick up the dis-
cussion of the technique from chapter 1, as I again pair a return—this time to
64 • INTRODUCTION