Everybody's Fool

In the opening chapter of Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool, Raymer ponders his former teacher Beryl Peoples’s “rhetorical triangle,” which develops a complex relationship between subject, audience, and speaker. The side of the triangle that baffles him the most is “speaker,” because Beryl stresses the importance of figuring out the identity of the person who is doing the communicating. Every act of speech, her lesson argues, means first distinguishing the persona behind the words from the human being doing the wordsmithing:

On each of his essays she wrote Who are you? […] There was always, she claimed, an “implied writer” lurking behind the writing itself. Not you, the actual author—not the person you saw when you looked in the mirror—but rather the “you” that you became when you picked up a pen with the intention to communicate. Who is this Douglas Raymer? She liked to ask provocatively (14-15).

Beryl’s triangle implies that Douglas Raymer assumes a different guise depending on who he is speaking to, his attitude toward them, and his communicative intentions. More broadly, the passage is metafictional, as the novel is asking the reader to consider the identity of the Richard Russo behind the