Second-person narrative

The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which a main character is referred to as "you" in the story (the reader taking that role), by employment of second-person personal pronouns (such as "you"). Example:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. —Opening lines of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (August 12, 1984)

Traditionally, the employment of the second-person form in literary fiction has not been as prevalent as the corresponding first-person and third-person forms, yet second-person narration is, in many languages, a very common technique of several popular and non- or quasi-fictional written genres such as guide books, self-help books, Do It Yourself-manuals, interactive fiction, role-playing games, gamebooks such as the Choose Your Own Adventure series, musical lyrics, and advertisements.

Although not the most common narrative technique in literary fiction, second-person narration has, however, constituted a favoured form of various literary works within, notably, the modern and post-modern tradition. In addition to a significant number of consistent (or nearly consistent) second-person novels and short-stories by, for example, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Carlos Fuentes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Georges Perec, and Jay McInerney, the technique of narrative second-person address has been widely employed in shorter or longer intermittent chapters or passages of narratives by William Faulkner, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, Nuruddin Farah, Jan Kjærstad and many others (cf. the list of second-person narratives below).

List of notable second-person narratives

Narratives written consistently in the second person or narratives including chapters or larger and/or intermittent passages in the second person:

• Ilse Aichinger 1954 "Spiegelgeschichte" from Meine Sprache und Ich: Erzählungen
• Brian W. Aldiss 1958 "Poor Little Warrior!" from The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus
• Simon Armitage 1999 All Points North
• John Ashmead 1961 The Mountain and the Feather
• Margaret Atwood 1983 "Happy Endings" Murder in the Dark
• Aniruddha Bahal 2003 Bunker 13
• Iain Banks 1993 Complicity
• Frederick Barthelme 1983 "Moon Deluxe" from Moon Deluxe: Stories
• Frederick Barthelme 1983 "Safeway" from Moon Deluxe: Stories
• Frederick Barthelme 1981 "Esquire 95" from Moon Deluxe: Stories
• Samuel Beckett 1979 Company
• Peter Bowman 1945 Beach Red
• Lionel Britton 1931 Hunger and Love
• Ron Butlin 1983 "The Tilting Room" The Tilting Room
• Ron Butlin 1983 "The Last Days" The Tilting Room
• Ron Butlin 1987 The Sound of My Voice
• Michel Butor 1957 La Modification (tr. Second Thoughts)
• Italo Calvino 1979 Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (tr. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)
• Angela Carter 1974 "Elegy for a Freelance" from Fireworks. Nine Profane Pieces
• Julio Cortázar 1979 "Graffiti" from We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales
• Edwidge Danticat 1995 Epilogue to Krik? Krak!
• Junot Diaz 1997 "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" from Drown
• Marguerite Duras 1982 La Maladie de la mort (tr. Malady of Death)
• Stuart Dybek 1994 "We Didn’t" from Prize Stories 1994. The O. Henry Awards
• Peter Everett 1966 The Fetch
• Oriana Fallaci 1979 A Man
• Nuruddin Farah 1986 Maps
• William Faulkner 1936 Absalom, Absalom!
• Max Frisch1976 "Burleske" from Max Frisch: Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, 1944-1949
• Carlos Fuentes 1962 Aura (tr. Aura)
• Carlos Fuentes 1962 La muerte de Artemio Cruz (tr. The death of Artemio Cruz)
• Carlos Fuentes Instinto de Inez (tr. Instinct of Inez)
• Mavis Gallant 1993 "Mille Dias de Corta"
• George Garrett 1983 The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James
• Margaret Gibson "Leaving" from Love Stories by New Women
• Rumer Godden "You Need to Go Upstairs" from Gone: A Thread of Stories
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon 1932 Sunset Song
• Günter Grass 1961 Katz und Maus (tr. Cat and Mouse)
• Alasdair Gray 1993 Tall Tales and True
• Daniel Gunn 1994 Almost YOU
• Sunetra Gupta 1993 The Glassblower's Breath
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1935 "The Haunted Mind" in Twice-Told Tales (1837)—
• Pam Houston 1990 "How to Talk to a Hunter" from Cowboys Are My Weakness
• Tara Ison 2007 The List
• A.M. Jenkins 2001 Damage
• Brian Stanley Johnson 1964 Albert Angelo
• A.L. Kennedy 2007 Day
• Jamaica Kincaid 1988 A Small Place
• Jan Kjærstad 1993 Forføreren (tr. The Seducer)
• Jhumpa Lahiri 2008 "Hema and Kaushik" a trio of short stories in Lahiri's lastest book Unaccustomed Earth
• Dennis Lehane 2004 "Until Gwen" in The Atlantic Monthly
• Karin Lowachee 2002 Warchild
• John Lydgate "The Legend of St. Gyle" from The Minor Poems of John Lydgate
• Mary McCarthy 1942 "The Genial Host" from The Company She Keeps
• John McGahern 1965 The Dark
• Jay McInerney 1984 Bright Lights, Big City
• Terry McMillan 1992 Waiting To Exhale an introductory chapter for Bernadine
• L.E. Modesitt, Jr. 1992 The Towers of the Sunset
• Lorrie Moore 1985 Self-Help (six of the nine short stories are second-person narratives)
• Alice Munro 1974 "Tell Me Yes or No" from Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories
• Gloria Naylor 1988 Mama Day
• Edna O'Brien 1970 A Pagan Place
• Tim O'Brien 1990 The Things They Carried
• Robert O'Connor 1994 Buffalo Soldiers
• Stewart O'Nan 1999 A Prayer for the Dying
• Chuck Palahniuk 2003 Diary (novel)
• Chuck Palahniuk 2005 "Foot Work" in Haunted
• Iain Pears 2005 The Portrait
• Georges Perec 1967 Un homme qui dort (tr. A Man Asleep)
• Richard Powers 2000 Plowing the Dark
• Ian Rankin "Glimmer" (Reprinted in the short story anthology Beggars Banquet, 2002)
• Tom Robbins 1994 Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
• Keith Roberts 1980 Molly Zero
• Norman Spinrad 1978 Riding the Torch
• Matthew Woodring Stover 2005 Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (several vignettes between chapters)
• Charles Stross 2007 Halting State
• Virgil Suarez 1989 Latin Jazz
• John Updike 2003 How to love America and leave it at the same time in The Early Stories: 1953-1975
• Jeff VanderMeer 2003 Veniss Underground
• Giovanni Verga 1879 "Fantasticheria" from Vita dei campi
• David Foster Wallace 1999 "Forever Overhead" in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• Edmund White 1978 Nocturnes for the King of Naples
• Tim Winton 2005 "Long, Clear View" in The Turning
• Christa Wolf 1976 Kindheitsmuster (tr. Patterns of Childhood)
• Gao Xingjian 1990 Ling Shan (tr. Soul Mountain)
• Michel Zéraffa 1964 L’Histoire

List of Criticism

• Helmut Bonheim (1983) "Narration in the Second Person" in Recherches anglaises et americaines, 16 (1): 69-80."
• John Capecci (1989) "Performing the Second-Person." in: Text and Performance Quarterly 1: 42-52.
• Matt DelConte (2003) "Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and a New Model for Understanding Narrative." in: Style 37: 204-19.
• Monika Fludernik (1994) Ed. "Second-Person Narrative." Special issue. in: Style 28.3.
• Monika Fludernik (1994) "Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography." in: Style 28.4: 525-48.
• Rita Gnutzmann (1983) "La novela hispanoamericana en segunda persona" ["The Hispano-American Novel in the Second Person"]. in: Iberoromania ns 17: 100-20.
• M. F. Hopkins, and L. Perkins (1981) "Second-Person Point of View" in d. F. N. Magill (ed.) Critical Survey of Short Fiction. 119-32.
• Irene Kacandes (1993) "Are You In the Text?: The 'Literary Performative' In Postmodernist Fiction." in: Text and Performance Quarterly 13: 139-53.
• Uri Margolin (1994) "Narrative 'You' Revisited." in: Language and Style 23.4: 1-21.
• Klaus Meyer-Minnemann (1984) "Narracion homodiegetica y 'segunda persona'" in: Acta Literaria 9: 5-27.
• Bruce Morrissette (1965) "Narrative 'You' in Contemporary Literature." in: Comparative Literature Studies 2 (1965): 1-24.
• Phelan, James (1994) "Self-Help for Narratee and Narrative Audience: How 'I' * and 'You' * Read 'How'." in: Style 28: 350-65.
• Brian Richardson (1994) "I etcetera: On the Poetics and Ideology of Multipersoned Narratives." in: Style 28: 312-28.
• Brian Richardson (2006) Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Postmodern Contemporary Fiction.
• Peter Standish (1991) "La segunda persona y el narratario en los cuentos de Cortázar" ["The Second Person and the Narratee in the Stories of Cortázar"]. in: Modern Language Notes 106: 432-40.
• Ursula Wiest-Kellner (1999) Messages from the Threshold. Die You-Erzählform als Ausdruck liminaler Wesen und Welten.

See also

• Narrative mode
• Narrator
• Role-playing games

External links

• Schofield, Dennis (1998-12-01). The Second Person: A Point of View? The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun in Narrative Prose Fiction. Deakin University. http://members.westnet.com.au/emmas/2p/thesis/0a.htm. Retrieved 2007-03-29.