authorial disclosures across conversations are another site where the role of
the unfolding responses of the audience influence the developing construc-
tion of a narrative. Authors rely on the inferences their audiences make on the
basis of earlier scenes of dialogue in their construction of subsequent scenes.
In other words, the underlying logic of the construction of a later scene resides
in (a) the details of the character-character relationship in interaction with the
specific occasion of the dialogue, (b) the author’s assessment of what the audi-
ence has inferred from previous conversations, and (c) the author’s assessment
of what the audience needs to infer from this new scene.
Both Higgins and O’Hara follow one typical trajectory of authorial disclo-
sure across conversations: characters initially know more than the audience,
then audiences catch up and there is considerable overlap in their relevant
knowledge of the key events and issues of the narrative, and by the end, the
audience knows much more about those events and issues than any one char-
acter. This pattern also allows the implied author to engage the audience in
epistemological questions of just how much and how firmly they—and the
characters—know. In other words, the pattern invites both interpretive chal-
lenges for the audience and play with degrees of ambiguity. At the same time,
in employing this pattern, the implied author can use the unfolding readerly
dynamics—the authorial audience’s responses to both the shifts in knowledge
and to the developing affective and ethical dimensions of the progression—to
inform their construction of the later authorial disclosures. In addition, how
the implied author handles this trajectory of revelation has a major effect on
the ethics of the telling. My analysis of the two narratives shall focus on dem-
onstrating the different ways Higgins and O’Hara deploy the pattern and the
larger consequences of each one’s deployment for the implied author–autho-
rial audience relationships in their narratives.
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURES IN
THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE
As noted in chapter 1, The Friends of Eddie Coyle consists of thirty chapters,
each devoted to a scene of dialogue (or a small set of such scenes) presented
in chronological order. Higgins typically restricts his narrator to the tasks of
delivering basic exposition, identifying speakers, and reporting key events in
a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner. He refrains from using the narrator
to make connections across scenes or to do more than minimal interpretation
of the events. As a result, the task of discerning the trajectory and coherence
of the larger narrative falls to Higgins’s audience. To be sure, Higgins gives
CONVERSATIONAL AND AUTHORIAL DISCLOSURE IN DIALOgUE • 169