Imagining a Sequel to Wayne C.

Booth‘s*
The Rhetoric of Fiction – Or A Dialogue on Dialogue
JAMES PHELAN

In the domain of narrative theory, Wayne C. Booth‘s two most important books are
The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep.i The Rhetoric of Fiction remains
required reading for narrative theorists because it gives us terms and concepts such as
implied author and unreliable narrator that we still find productive (and worthy of
debate), because it demonstrates the fallacious reasoning underlying abstract rules
such as ‗showing is better than telling‘ (such reasoning mistakes means for ends), and
because it has paved the way for an understanding of any novel, and more broadly,
any narrative as a rhetorical action: an author‘s attempt to harness all the resources of
storytelling for the purpose of a set of effects (cognitive, emotional, ethical) on an
audience. The Company We Keep remains required reading because it develops that
rhetorical understanding of the novel as it investigates the nature and importance of
the ethical effects of fiction. More specifically, Company explores the metaphor of
books-as-friends by identifying the variety of invitations that authors extend to
audiences (from subtle seductions to in-your-face challenges) and by calling attention
to the patterns of desire that such invitations – and the narrative trajectories that
follow from them – lead their audiences to experience. Both books derive their power
from the interconnections among Booth‘s study of his central subject (narrative
discourse, the ethics of fiction), his interpretations of individual narratives (everything
from Jane Austen‘s Emma to trite didactic pieces of his own composition), and his
underlying conception of narrative as rhetoric (authors doing things with, to, and for
readers). Those interconnections not only make it rewarding to re-read the books –
each time through we see more of those connections and more of their value – but
also lead me, in this essay about Booth‘s legacy, to speculate about what a second
volume of The Rhetoric of Fiction would look like, if Booth had taken up such a
project as a way to round out his career. Given that the 1961 volume focuses so much
on ‗telling‘ (what Booth sometimes calls ‗overt authorial rhetoric‘), I speculate that
this second volume would focus on ‗showing‘– or more specifically, on character-
character dialogue – and it would give considerable attention to the ethical dimensions
of that dialogue. A plausible title would be A Rhetoric and Ethics of Dialogue in
Fiction.
Since I want to trace out the logic not only of Booth‘s thinking about narrative as
rhetoric but also about the rhetoric of his own critical prose, I cast my speculation
about how Booth would carry out this project in a form that I am confident he would

*
Wayne C. Booth (February 22, 1921-October 19, 2005) received his Ph.D. from the University of
Chicago in 1950, taught at Haverford College, Earlham College, and from 1962 until his retirement
in 1992 at the University of Chicago. At the time of his death, he was the George M. Pullman
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Chicago. Booth was the author of The Rhetoric of
Fiction (1961), A Rhetoric of Irony (1974), Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974),
Critical Understanding (1979), The Company We Keep (1988), The Vocation of a Teacher (1988),
For the Love of It (1999), The Rhetoric of Rhetoric (2004) and the posthumous My Many Selves
(2006). He was a founding editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, and he served as President of the
Modern Language Association in 1982.
 2

have used for at least some of it: a dialogue. Furthermore, in constructing Booth as a
speaker in this dialogue, I am aware of another kind of dialogue that deeply informs
every hammer stroke of that construction: the one that I have carried on with Booth
and his ideas since first encountering them in graduate school in the 1970s. In other
words, the Wayne Booth to whom I give voice below is not intended to be ‗Wayne
Booth Unfiltered,‘ or even ‗Wayne C. Booth: The Implied Author of The Rhetoric of
Fiction‘. Instead, if the implied author is, as Booth suggests, an actual author‘s second
self, the Wayne Booth who speaks in the dialogue below is a kind of third self, a
hybrid Booth-Phelan constructed on the basis of thirty years of real conversations in
Chicago, Columbus, and elsewhere and of hypothetical ones inside my own head.
Consequently, if, in reading what follows, you infer that my investment in the idea of
a kind of sequel to The Rhetoric of Fiction that focuses on dialogue goes beyond what
I can explore in this piece, then I compliment you on your interpretive acuity.
The scene: Wayne Booth‘s office at the University of Chicago in January of 2005.
Booth is at his desk, reading the latest issue of Narrative, when an unexpected visitor
arrives. He identifies himself as Ozzie Freedman, the protagonist of Philip Roth‘s
story ‗The Conversion of the Jews‘. Although aware that significant ontological
barriers have been breached, Booth decides to go with this metaleptic flow rather than
resist it. After all, he has always admired Ozzie‘s intellectual curiosity, and, indeed,
has often found inspiration in one of Ozzie‘s key lines: ‗what I wanted to know was
different‘.ii At the same time, Booth is a little leery, as he recalls that, in Roth‘s story,
the boyish Ozzie doggedly points out holes in the logic of what his rabbi tells him
about Jewish beliefs. Booth also remembers that Ozzie has sufficient rhetorical power
to make his mother, Rabbi Binder, and numerous others admit that an omnipotent
God ‗can make a child without intercourse‘.iii If Ozzie could do that to his Jewish
elders when he was a kid in 1959, Booth wonders, what will the fifty-something
Ozzie do in 2005?
Ozzie explains that he has recently retired from his career as a lawyer working for
the American Civil Liberties Union and that he is now turning his attention to writing
fiction (‗I want to give back‘, is the way he puts it). In order to prepare for his new
career, he‘s been reading narrative theory, and he has a major question that he hopes
Booth might be able to answer. The following dialogue ensues:
OF: ‗What‘s up with narrative theory‘s neglect of dialogue between characters? I can
see why you guys are so interested in narrators and narrative discourse, but shouldn‘t
dialogue get something approaching equal time?‘
WCB: ‗What do you mean? There‘s lots of good work on dialogue, starting with
Norman Page‘s Speech in the English Novel.iv Irene Kacandes has written a whole
book on Talk Fiction.v David Herman has some strong analyses of the sociolinguistic
dimensions of character-character dialogue in Story Logic and elsewhere.vi Above all,
Mikhail Bakhtin famously says that the novel is a genre built on dialogic relations
among its different discourses, including those of characters‘.vii
OF: ‗Yeah, yeah, I‘ve read that stuff, but what I want to know is different. What‘s the
relation between narrative discourse and characters‘ speech?‘
WCB: ‗Well, there‘s an enormous quantity of work on free indirect discourse that
addresses just this question and explores its mingling of narrator and character voices.
Meir Sternberg, in a couple of essays, trenchantly analyses the relation between what
he calls the quoter and the quotee or the inset and the frame, demonstrating how much
the representation of the quotee‘s speech depends on the strategy and purposes of the
quoter. viiiMore generally, at the risk of sounding immodest, I think it‘s fair to say that
 3

most theorists from Henry James to Percy Lubbock to Gérard Genette and beyond
would agree with my contention in The Rhetoric of Fiction that narrators‘ discourse
and characters‘ speech, despite their many surface differences, are different means of
accomplishing similar ends.‘
OF: ‗I‘ll come back to that means-ends stuff, but what I want to know now is
different. How come characters aren‘t agents in Seymour Chatman‘s communication
model? Let me it sketch so we both have it in front of usix:

Narrative Text
Real Author→Implied Author→Narrator→Text→Narratee→Implied Reader→Real Reader

Chatman includes 2 kinds of authors, the narrator, and 3 kinds of audiences but no
characters. Isn‘t dialogue part of narrative communication? What are my lines in
Roth‘s story? Chopped liver?‘
WCB: ‗Easy, Ozzie, easy. Seymour‘s a real mensch, and he‘d never disrespect you or
your dialogue. His model implicitly accounts for your lines as part of what the
narrator reports to the narratee. Besides, Seymour is also interested in what he calls
―unmediated transmission,‖ cases where the narrator‘s role is minimal at best. Look at
this half of Chatman‘s model of narrative structure from the very last page of Story
and Discourse:x

Mediated T ransmission
Narrator-Narratee

Real Author Implied Author Discourse Implied Reader Real Reader

Unmediated T ransmission
('No' or Minimal Narrator)

Seymour doesn‘t put characters explicitly in the model, but, in cases of unmediated
transmission, their speech is the key means by which the implied author
communicates to her audience.‘
OF: ‗It‘s sweet of you to defend your friend, but my point is that characters and their
speech should be explicitly marked in the model – in both halves. Characters‘ lines
matter as much as those of the narrator and sometimes more. If I told Roth he couldn‘t
use my lines in ―The Conversion of the Jews,‖ he‘d have been in deep trouble, right?
And don‘t get me started about narratees, the Freeloaders of Narrative Theory, who
get in all the models despite almost never saying anything. In fact, if they speak, they
become characters, but then their speech gets erased from the model. It‘s enough to
make the lawyer in me contemplate a class action suit on behalf of fictional characters
against all you narrative theorists.‘
WCB: ‗Okay, Ozzie, you win – but not because of your threats about a lawsuit: you
could never get all those characters to agree on anything, and it‘s not like we narrative
theorists are sitting on piles of dough. Still, I take your point: if narratees are in the
 4

model, characters should be too. We‘d have to abandon the straight-line version of the
model, but we could modify the one at the end of Story and Discourse along these
lines:

Mediated T ransmission
Narrator Narratee
Narrator Character Character Narratee

Real Author Implied Author Discourse Implied Reader Real Reader

Character Character
('No' or Minimal Narrator)
Unmediated T ransmission

But what will that do for you besides giving you a little more visibility?‘
OF: ‗Don‘t underestimate visibility, which is almost always a good thing, and is
absolutely necessary here. Once we put characters in the model, people will start to
pay attention to them in a way that they haven‘t before. But I also take your point.
Just adding characters to the model isn‘t going to tell me what I want to know.‘
WCB: ‗Which is?‘
OF: ‗Well, I was hoping you, as the alleged expert, could help me formulate my
question. Let‘s go back to what you said about the choice between a scene of dialogue
and a summary in the narrator‘s voice being a choice of different means to similar
ends. Can you go over the logic of that again?‘
WCB: ‗Sure. Suppose I wanted to tell people about our conversation today. I could
either reproduce it or summarise it: different means, similar end.‘
OF: ‗Hmpf. The logic is as weak as I thought. Your example works only because
―telling people about our conversation‖ is such a flabby description of the end. If you
tell through summary, you‘re going to leave all kinds of things out and therefore
imply that only some of the details of our communication were important. If you tell
through reproduction, you keep everything in and imply that it‘s all important.
Furthermore, there‘s a display element in the representation of the speech of some
characters that is totally lost in a summary. Fess up: if you wanted to tell people about
our conversation, you‘d want to get my voice into your account, wouldn‘t you? If
Roth hadn‘t understood the huge difference between dialogue and summary, he‘d
never have made it as a writer. If I didn‘t understand that difference, I‘d never have
made it as a lawyer. But I guess in the academy, you can overlook the difference and
still get by.‘
WCB: ‗I‘ll bet judges used to love looking up from the bench and seeing you. But
again I see your point – and even perhaps a glimpse of what you want to know. Your
questions are about how scenes of dialogue function not just as showing but also as
telling. Or to put it another way, what roles do characters play in the narrative
transmission?
 5

OF: ‗Yeah, that sounds close – or close enough. Got any answers for me?‘
WCB: ‗Well, nothing quick and easy that will work for all dialogue across all
narratives. How much time do you have?
OF: ‗Not much. But I can come back – if I think it‘ll be worth my while.‘
WCB: ‗Okay, here goes. In a new book, Living to Tell about It, James Phelan, a
former student of mine, argues that character narration is an art of indirection in
which an implied author uses the single text of the character narrator to address
different audiences (the narratee and the authorial audience) for different purposes
(the character narrator‘s and the implied author‘s).xi If we extend that logic to scenes
of dialogue, then we find an even more complex art of indirection: multiple speakers,
audiences, and purposes, and the character-character interaction will be more or less
mediated by the narrator-narratee communication. Furthermore, the key to the
indirection is that the implied author needs to construct each character‘s speech with a
dual audience in mind: the character‘s interlocutor(s) and the author‘s own audience.
In other words, the characters‘ lines must appear to be well-motivated within their
mimetic contexts even as those lines must simultaneously advance the implied
author‘s telling to her audience. We sometimes miss this dimension of characters‘
speech because we‘re caught up in what you called its display.‘
OF: ‗Let me try to translate that into more user-friendly words: I‘ve always thought
that what I said to my brother Itzie and to Rabbi Binder was motivated only by my
sense of what the situation called for, but you‘re saying that my lines were equally
motivated by Roth‘s interest in displaying the speech of a young Jewish American
boy in the 1950s and in telling his readers not just what I told Itzie and Binder but lots
of other things I wasn‘t aware of. Okay, not bad. You got anything else?‘
WCB: ‗Well, Phelan has followed up my work on unreliable narration in ways that
could be adapted for your purposes. He observes that the main functions of narrators
are to report about settings, characters, and events, to read or interpret those reports,
and to regard or evaluate them in accord with some ethical values. He then uses that
observation to identify six kinds of unreliability: misreporting and underreporting,
misreading and underreading, and misregarding and underregarding. xii For our
purposes Phelan‘s work is potentially useful, because it suggests that scenes of
conversation can also perform the telling functions of reporting, reading, and
regarding and that these scenes can perform them reliably or unreliably. To test this
hypothesis, let‘s turn to examples of mediated and unmediated transmission. Here‘s a
passage from the beginning of Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God:

A mood come alive. Words walking without masters, walking altogether like
harmony in a song.
‗What she doin coming back here in dem overhalls? Can‘t she find no dress to
put on? – Where‘s dat blue satin dress she left here in? – Where all dat money her
husband took and died and left her? – What dat ole forty year ole ‗oman doin‘ wid
her hair swingin‘ down her back lak some young gal? – Where she left dat young
lad of a boy she went off here wid? – Thought she was going to marry? Where he
left her? – What he done wid all her money? – Betcha he off wid some gal so
young she ain‘t even got no hairs – why she don‘t stay in her class? –‘ . . . .
But nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody even thought to swallow spit until
after her gate slammed shut behind her.
 6

Pearl Stone opened her mouth and laughed real hard because she didn‘t know
what else to do. She fell all over Mrs. Sumpkins while she laughed. Mrs. Sumpkins
snorted violently and sucked her teeth.
‗Humph! Y‘all let her worry yuh. You ain‘t like me. Ah ain‘t got her to study
‗bout. If she ain‘t got manners enough to stop and let folks know how she been
makin‘ out, let her g‘wan!‘
‗She ain‘t even worth talkin‘ after,‘ Lulu Moss drawled through her nose. ‗She
sits high, but she looks low. Dat‘s what Ah say ‗bout dese ole women runnin‘ after
young boys.‘
Pheoby Watson hitched her rocking chair forward before she spoke. ‗Well,
nobody don‘t know if it‘s anything to tell or not. Me, Ah‘m her best friend, and Ah
don‘t know.‘
‗Maybe us don‘t know into things lak you do, but we all know how she went
‗way from here and us sho seen her come back. ‗Tain‘t no use in your tryin‘ to
cloak no ole woman lak Janie Starks, Pheoby, friend or no friend.‘
‗At dat she ain‘t so ole as some of y‘all dat‘s talking.‘
‗She way past forty to my knowledge, Pheoby.‘
‗No more‘n forty at de outside.‘
‗She way too old for a boy like Tea Cake.‘
‗Tea Cake ain‘t been no boy for some time. He‘s round thirty his own self.‘
‗Don‘t keer what it was, she could stop and say a few words with us. She act
like we done done something to her,‘ Pearl Stone complained. ‗She de one been
doin‘ wrong.‘
‗You mean, you mad ‗cause she didn‘t stop and tell us all her business.
Anyhow, what you ever know her to do so bad as y‘all make out? The worth thing
Ah ever knowed her to do was taking a few years offa her age and dat ain‘t never
harmed nobody. Y‘all makes me tired. De way you talkin‘ you‘d think de folks in
dis town didn‘t do nothing in de bed ‘cept praise de Lawd. You have to ‘scuse me,
‘cause Ah‘m bound to go take her some supper.‘xiii

‗With reporting, we can start with the idea that the conversation is itself an event,
and that its location and its duration are part of the authorial communication. Any
scene of dialogue in what Peter J. Rabinowitz calls a privileged position such as a
beginning or an ending is going to be marked as a more important event than one that
is not so marked. Any scene in a narrative beginning is going to our introduction to
the author-narrator-character-audience chain of communication. Furthermore, since
scenes of dialogue typically match story time closely with discourse time, the longer
the duration of the scene, the more the author is marking its significance within the
economy of the whole narrative. We can then ask whether this event also functions to
report other events, and if it does, whether that reporting is reliable, straightforward,
fragmentary, on the surface, or embedded in the dialogue. In addition, we can ask
about the kind and degree of relevance of those reported events to the developing
action. To address these questions, we should distinguish between authorial
disclosure and conversational disclosure. Sometimes the two disclosures match
closely, but they don‘t have to. Often characters will make shorthand, oblique, or
otherwise sketchy references to other events because their interlocutors already know
about those events. Authors use those sketchy references for fragmentary disclosure in
order to introduce tensions into their developing progressions.‘
OF: ‗You‘re now officially doing better than Rabbi Binder did with any of my
questions to him. I can see that the authorial and the conversational disclosures don‘t
 7

match here. Hurston puts the focus on the speakers‘ collective judgements about Janie
Crawford, while simultaneously disclosing to her audience bits and pieces of Janie‘s
backstory. Consequently, while she characterises – and judges – these speakers, she
also piques her audience‘s interest in closing the distance between what the speakers
know and what we can glean from their speech. Thus, Hurston uses the gap between
authorial disclosure and conversational disclosure to deepen our interest in what she
will report next. Pretty cool. How about some unmediated transmission?‘
WCB: ‗Here‘s something from the beginning of George V. Higgins‘s The Friends of
Eddie Coyle, a novel told almost entirely through dialogue. Jackie Brown, a gun
dealer, and a potential new customer, identified only as ―the stocky man‖ are talking
about a deal:

‗Count your fucking knuckles,‘ the stocky man said.

‗All of them?‘ Jackie Brown said.
‗Ah, Christ,‘ the stocky man said. ‗Count as many of them as you want. I got
four more. One on each finger. Know how I got those? I bought some stuff from a
man that I had his name, and it got traced, and the man I bought it for he went to
MCI Walpole for fifteen to twenty-five. Still in there, but he had some friends. I
got an extra set of knuckles. Shut my hand in a drawer. Then one of them stomped
the drawer shut. Hurt like a fucking bastard. You got no idea how it hurt.‘
‗Jesus,‘ Jackie Brown said.
‗What made it hurt more,‘ the stocky man said, ‗what made it hurt worse was
knowing what they were going to do to you, you know? There you are and they tell
you very matter of fact that you made somebody mad, you made a big mistake and
now there‘s somebody doing time for it, and it isn‘t anything personal, you
understand, but it just has to be done. Now get your hand out there. You think
about not doing it, you know? I was in Sunday School when I was a kid and this
nun says to me, stick out your hand, and the first few times I do it she whacks me
right across the knuckles with a steel-edged ruler. It was just like that. So one day I
says, when she tells me ―Put out your hand,‖ I say, ―No.‖ And she whaps me right
across the face with that ruler. Same thing. Except these guys weren‘t mad, they
aren‘t mad at you, you know? Guys you see all the time, maybe guys you didn‘t
like, maybe guys you did, maybe had some drinks with, maybe looked out for the
girls. ―Hey, look, Paulie, nothing personal, you know? You made a mistake. The
hand. I don‘t wanna have to shoot you, you know.‖ So you stick out the hand and –
you get to put out the hand you want – I take the left because I‘m right-handed and
I know what‘s going to happen, like I say, and they put your fingers in the drawer
and then one of them kicks it shut. Ever hear bones breaking? Just like a man
snapping a shingle. Hurts like a bastard.‘
‗Jesus,‘ Jackie Brown said.xiv
Notice that the display element is as prominent here as it is in Hurston. Higgins, who
worked as a prosecutor in Boston for many years, captures the diction and syntax of
this class of criminals, and he offers the reader the experience of their voices. In terms
of reporting, notice how skillfully Higgins uses the presence of Jackie Brown for his
telling to his audience. As Jackie learns about the stocky man‘s four extra knuckles so
too does Higgins‘s audience. As Jackie learns about the stocky man‘s character from
his report – he thinks he‘s a tough guy, but he‘s also been a loser – so too does
Higgins‘s audience. As Jackie learns about the way justice works in the stocky man‘s
corner of the world, so too does Higgins‘s audience. And so on. In these ways, the
 8

conversational and the authorial disclosure are a close match. But ultimately they are
not a perfect match because in Higgins‘s audience we know something that Jackie
doesn‘t, namely, that both he and the stocky man are characters in Higgins‘s novel.
Thus, Higgins invites us to regard the stocky man‘s story as a keynote for the rest of
the narrative and to entertain the idea that dialogue itself will be one of its central
thematic issues.‘
OF: ‗And what happens if we accept those invitations?‘
WCB: ‗We get rewarded. We soon learn that the stocky man is Eddie Coyle, that he
buys guns from Jackie Brown to supply a band of men pulling bank robberies and that
he is facing jail time for having been caught transporting contraband. He wants to
avoid the jail time by doing a favor for a Boston policeman who can put in a good
word for him with the District Attorney in New Hampshire. But the policeman wants
something substantial from Eddie. Eddie first gives up Jackie Brown, but it turns out
that the policeman isn‘t satisfied because Jackie‘s too low in the picking order. Then
Eddie is on the verge of giving up the bank robbers, when he finds out that they‘ve
already been arrested. Eddie‘s too late because the ringleader of the bank robbers
disrespects – and underestimates – the stewardess that he is sleeping with, leading her
to tip off another policeman. But the network of criminals that both Eddie and the
bank robbers are tied into decide that Eddie must have been the one to give the police
the information they needed to arrest the bank robbers, and so, they neatly and
efficiently execute him. Higgins‘s reader is left saying with Jackie Brown, ―Jesus.‖ At
the same time, the novel is a very good exemplar of its genre not only because of
these multiple ironies but also because of the ethics of the telling. Higgins‘s treatment
of his audience – his respect for our intelligence, his subtle but steady guidance of our
judgements – is in marked contrast to the ethics of Eddie‘s world.‘
OF: ‗Nice. You got anything more on reporting?‘
WCB: ‗Well, some stuff on how conversational disclosure and authorial disclosure
work across conversations, especially in cases such as Eddie Coyle where the
narrator‘s role is so restricted. For example, later in this first chapter we learn that
Eddie will pay Jackie $60 per gun, and then in two separate later conversations we
learn that (a) Eddie sells those guns for $150 each; (b) Jackie gets them for $20 each;
and (c) Jackie‘s supplier gets them for nothing.xv If we‘re tracking the authorial
disclosure, we realise that Higgins uses the distinct conversational disclosures – and
the fact that each party accepts his role in the transaction – to tell us about both
business transactions and business ethics in this underworld. Eddie and Jackie engage
in a long negotiation but it has a ritualistic quality, with each of them knowing that
they‘ll eventually compromise. Everybody is turning a nice profit on each transaction,
but nobody begrudges the other party this profit—because ultimately it‘s the Federal
Deposit Insurance Company that funds the whole operation by making good on the
money stolen from the banks that are robbed with these guns.‘
OF: ‗What about reading or interpreting?‘
WCB: ‗Here we want to hone in on the relative authority/reliability of each speaker‘s
interpretations and about how each one‘s voice relates to the larger system of
authority/reliability in the narrative. And I suspect that our attention to reading will
inevitably lead us to consider regarding as well. Suppose you try the Hurston.‘
OF: ‗What strikes me first is that Bakhtin‘s analysis in ―Discourse in the Novel,‖
especially what he says about the orchestration of voices, is very relevant to this
passage. Is that analysis compatible with the approach you‘ve been sketching here?‘
 9

WCB: ‗I certainly think so. Let‘s see what you can do with it.‘
OF: ‗Hurston uses the narrator‘s framing of the scene to do two things: (1) lump the
different character voices together – in that sense, Bakhtin would say this dialogue is
decidedly nondialogic; and (2) to undercut their interpretations and their evaluations
of Janie. Then Hurston varies the orchestration by marking out Pheoby Watson‘s
speech as different from the others and by using it to undercut further the authority
and reliability of their judgements and to mark Pheoby as aligned both interpretively
and ethically with the narrator and with Janie. The result is that we know that the
others‘ judgements are both off-base and ethically deficient, even as we accept their
fragmentary reporting of events as reliable. All in all, Hurston emerges as a skillful
orchestrator of the voices of her narrator and her characters. What about reading and
regarding in the passage from Higgins?‘
WCB: ‗Well, Eddie has more authority than Jackie, and he reliably interprets the way
in which his punishment was not personal but just business. But through Eddie‘s story
Higgins reveals something to both Jackie and us about the limits of Eddie‘s authority:
he‘s just a small player in a much bigger system. Furthermore, despite the
authoritative tone Eddie takes with Jackie, Higgins uses Eddie‘s speech to convey to
us that his situation is precarious because he already has one strike against him and
because he has to trust people that he can‘t be sure are trustworthy. The latter point is
reinforced because even here he has to take or leave Jackie‘s claim that his guns can‘t
be traced. And that reinforcement takes us back to our earlier conclusion about how
Higgins use of dialogue as technique supports his thematic interest in the ethics of
dialogue. In sum, Higgins shows himself to be a master of using unmediated showing
as telling.‘
OF: ‗Well, I must say that you‘ve won me over. I‘m very glad I came to see you,
though now I find the task of writing my own dialogue to be much more daunting.
Perhaps you‘d be open to a return visit and more dialogue about dialogue?‘
WCB: ‗Absolutely. I‘m excited about building on the work we did today. By going
deeper into the details of the indirect communication of character-character dialogue
and by engaging with a wider range of narrative, I think we could help each other a
lot. So thank you for provoking me to think harder.‘

NOTES
i
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983 [1961]) and The Company We Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Booth‘s
A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) is a strong complement to these two books, and Critical Understanding
(1979) offers an excellent case for the practical value of critical pluralism. In addition, Modern
Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (1974) and A Rhetoric of Rhetoric (2004) combine with Booth‘s
books of literary criticism to establish him as one of the most significant figures in the recent
history of rhetoric. Since Booth‘s death in October of 1975, there have been several important
appreciations of his work, including special issues of Narrative (Spring 2007) and Pedagogy
(January 2007). In addition, Walter Jost, in consultation with Booth before his death, selected
seventeen essays as comprising The Essential Wayne Booth (2006) and in his introduction offered
an excellent overview of Booth‘s career-long attention to ethical character as evident in – and
shaped by – rhetorical exchange. Given this other work on Booth‘s legacy, I have opted here less
for an overview and more for a demonstration of how Booth‘s contributions to narrative theory can
be brought to bear on a significant issue for the field.
ii
Phillip Roth, ‗The Conversion of the Jews‘, in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (New
York: Meridian), p. 147.
 10

iii
Ibid., p. 157.
iv
Norman Page, Speech in the English Novel (London: Longman, 1973), second edition
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988).
v
Irene Kacandes, Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2001).
vi
David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2002).
vii
Mikhail Bakhtin, ‗Discourse in the Novel‘, in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael
Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1981).
viii
Meir Sternberg, ‗Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the forms of reported discourse‘, Poetics
Today 3:2 (1982), 107–156, and ‗Point of View and the Indirectness of Direct Speech,‘ Language
and Style 15 (1982), 67–117.
ix
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structures in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1978), p. 151.
x
Ibid., p. 267.
xi
James Phelan, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005).
xii
Ibid., pp. 49–53.
xiii
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006 [1937]),
pp. 2–3.
xiv
George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 2–4.
xv
Ibid., pp. 9, 22, 30, 31.