Differing Narratives in "No One's A Mystery" and "White Elephant Hills"

Both "No One's a Mystery" and "White Elephant Hills" contain multiple layers of narrative and characterizations as the two characters of each story have their own narratives that the other character then attempts to override or control.
    The parallels of these stories are striking, which is why I think talking about both them does a lot to highlight the power dynamic that may or may not be inherently a part of dialogue.  Both stories have an older man and a younger girl.  The female characters' will does not originally agree with that of the male love interest.  These men then attempt to "rewrite" or re-narrate the female character's dialogue.  This can be seen in "White Elephant Hills" when the girl is worried about how their relationship could return to what it was before their pregnancy and feels hopeless, the man responds, "You mustn't feel that way".  In "No One's a Mystery", Jack tells the girl, "Tonight you'll write...In a year you'll write...In two years you'll write."  While she disagrees with him, the dialogue is a necessary part of showing how these two narratives interact, with one eventually subsuming the other.  This tension can only be shown in dialogue.  It is so impressive that both Tallent and Hemingway are able to convey so much in terms of characterization and the relationship dynamics using such natural language.

    Dialogue is able to show characters and their personalities in a way that setting, description, or monologue, can't.   Having the characters themselves show the reader who they are within a relationship is so much more realistic than having a narrator simply tell them. This is something that in my own writing I have been really challenged by because it has been hard to keep the dialogue at once realistic (like we see in "White Elephant Hills" and in "No One's a Mystery") and multi-faceted.