the narrating-I, or the implied Didion to the conclusion that there was noth-
ing she or John could have done: they—and his cardiologists—could have
continued to monitor his LAD. Even if the implied Didion wants to make the
case that such monitoring would ultimately not have mattered, the way she
has set up the passage both globally and locally entails the necessity of her
making that case. The implied Didion’s missing the contradiction between the
way she sets up the autopsy report and the way she treats the experiencing-
I’s response to it renders the narration off-kilter. Furthermore, the implied
Didion’s choice to have the narrating-I quote the cardiologist’s ominous words
after John’s angioplasty (We call it the widowmaker, pal) only underlines the
break in the purposive design.
Let me come at the same point from another direction: why would I
or any reader notice that this clause is off-kilter? Because of our unfolding
responses to the progression. In my own experience, the clause seemed to
jump off the page because it ran so counter to the expectations and desires
I had developed by attending to the narrating-I’s quest for something that
could have made a difference. Attuned to expect and desire some resolution
to the quest, I was stunned that the narrating-I and the implied Didion both
interpret this strong evidence that there was something that she and John
might have done as grounds for the conclusion that there was nothing they
could have done.
The actual reader’s understanding of the memoir’s status as nonfiction
supports this analysis, as becomes clear in a thought experiment of taking the
narrative as fictional. In that case, readers who have intuited the larger system
of intentionality would regard as unreliable interpreting and evaluating the
passage’s conclusion that “nothing he or I had done or not done” would have
made a difference. The setup, with its focus on the search for what could have
been done, and the conclusion, with its quotation of the cardiologist, would
be sure signs that the implied author is signaling the narrator’s misinterpreta-
tion of the report. Readers would be likely to conclude that the implied Did-
ion wants her audience to understand that the character narrator so deeply
needs to end her search for something she could have done differently that
she goes ahead and ends it even after she is presented with exactly what she
has been looking for. Furthermore, this instance of misinterpreting would
contribute to a larger design that depends on the development of distance
between the implied Didion and her narrating-I for the rest of the fiction. As
part of this design, the resolution in which the narrating-I and experiencing-I
come together in the conclusion that they need to “go with the change” would
signify not an important stage in the working through of the experiencing-I’s
grief but rather a short-circuit of that working through. This resolution would
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