Second-person narrative

The second-person narrative is a narrative mode in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun "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 (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, advertisements and also blogs.

Although not the most common narrative technique in literary fiction, second-person narration has 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, 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:

• John Lydgate "The Legend of St. Gyle" from The Minor Poems of John Lydgate
• Leo Tolstoy 1855 Sebastopol in December, 1854 Part I of Sebastopol Sketches
• Giovanni Verga 1879 "Fantasticheria" from Vita dei campi
• Lionel Britton 1931 Hunger and Love
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon 1932 Sunset Song
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1935 "The Haunted Mind" in Twice-Told Tales (1837)
• William Faulkner 1936 Absalom, Absalom!
• Mary McCarthy 1942 "The Genial Host" from The Company She Keeps
• Peter Bowman 1945 Beach Red
• Ilse Aichinger 1954 "Spiegelgeschichte" from Meine Sprache und Ich: Erzählungen
• Albert Camus 1956 La Chute (tr. The Fall)
• Michel Butor 1957 La Modification (tr. Second Thoughts)
• Brian W. Aldiss 1958 "Poor Little Warrior!" from The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus
• John Ashmead 1961 The Mountain and the Feather
• Günter Grass 1961 Katz und Maus (tr. Cat and Mouse)
• Carlos Fuentes 1962 Aura (tr. Aura)
• Carlos Fuentes 1962 La muerte de Artemio Cruz (tr. The death of Artemio Cruz)
• Michel Zéraffa 1964 L’Histoire
• Brian Stanley Johnson 1964 Albert Angelo
• John McGahern 1965 The Dark
• Peter Everett 1966 The Fetch
• Georges Perec 1967 Un homme qui dort (tr. A Man Asleep)
• Rumer Godden 1968 "You Need to Go Upstairs" from Gone: A Thread of Stories
• Edna O'Brien 1970 A Pagan Place
• Angela Carter 1974 "Elegy for a Freelance" from Fireworks. Nine Profane Pieces
• Alice Munro 1974 "Tell Me Yes or No" from Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You: Thirteen Stories
• Max Frisch 1976 "Burleske" from Max Frisch: Gesammelte Werke in zeitlicher Folge, 1944-1949
• Christa Wolf 1976 Kindheitsmuster (tr. Patterns of Childhood)
• Margaret Gibson 1978 "Leaving" from Love Stories by New Women
• Edmund White 1978 Nocturnes for the King of Naples
• Norman Spinrad 1978 Riding the Torch
• Julio Cortázar 1979 "Graffiti" from We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales
• Oriana Fallaci 1979 A Man
• Samuel Beckett 1979 Company
• Italo Calvino 1979 Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (tr. If on a winter's night a traveler)
• Keith Roberts 1980 Molly Zero
• Frederick Barthelme 1981 "Esquire 95" from Moon Deluxe: Stories
• Marguerite Duras 1982 La Maladie de la mort (tr. Malady of Death)
• Margaret Atwood 1983 "Happy Endings" Murder in the Dark
• Frederick Barthelme 1983 "Moon Deluxe" from Moon Deluxe: Stories
• Frederick Barthelme 1983 "Safeway" from Moon Deluxe: Stories
• George Garrett 1983 The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James
• Jay McInerney 1984 Bright Lights, Big City
• Lorrie Moore 1985 Self-Help (six of the nine short stories are second-person narratives)
• Nuruddin Farah 1986 Maps
• Ron Butlin 1987 The Sound of My Voice
• Jamaica Kincaid 1988 A Small Place
• Gloria Naylor 1988 Mama Day
• Virgil Suarez 1989 Latin Jazz
• Gao Xingjian 1990 Ling Shan (tr. Soul Mountain)
• Dr Seuss 1990 Oh, the Places You'll Go!
• Tim O'Brien 1990 The Things They Carried
• L.E. Modesitt, Jr. 1992 The Towers of the Sunset
• Terry McMillan 1992 Waiting To Exhale an introductory chapter for Bernadine
• Mavis Gallant 1993 "Mille Dias de Corta"
• Jan Kjærstad 1993 Forføreren (tr. The Seducer)
• Alasdair Gray 1993 Tall Tales and True
• Iain Banks 1993 Complicity
• Sunetra Gupta 1993 The Glassblower's Breath
• Stuart Dybek 1994 "We Didn't" from Prize Stories 1994. The O. Henry Awards
• Robert O'Connor 1994 Buffalo Soldiers
• Tom Robbins 1994 Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
• Edwidge Danticat 1995 Epilogue to Krik? Krak!
• Junot Diaz 1997 "How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)" from Drown
• David Foster Wallace 1999 "Forever Overhead" in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• Stewart O'Nan 1999 A Prayer for the Dying
• Simon Armitage 1999 All Points North
• Richard Powers 2000 Plowing the Dark
• Carlos Fuentes 2001 Instinto de Inez (tr. Instinct of Inez)
• Ian Rankin "Glimmer" (Reprinted in the short story anthology Beggars Banquet, 2002)
• Karin Lowachee 2002 Warchild
• Julie Orringer 2003 "Note to Sixth Grade Self" in How to Breathe Underwater
• Aniruddha Bahal 2003 Bunker 13
• John Updike 2003 How to love America and leave it at the same time in The Early Stories: 1953-1975
• Nikki Gemmell 2003 The Bride Stripped Bare
• Jeff VanderMeer 2003 Veniss Underground
• Dennis Lehane 2004 "Until Gwen" in The Atlantic Monthly
• Chuck Palahniuk 2005 "Foot Work" in Haunted
• Tim Winton 2005 "Long, Clear View" in The Turning
• Iain Pears 2005 The Portrait
• Matthew Woodring Stover 2005 Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (several vignettes between chapters)
• A.L. Kennedy 2007 Day
• Charles Stross 2007 Halting State
• Jhumpa Lahiri 2008 "Hema and Kaushik" a trio of short stories in Lahiri's latest book Unaccustomed Earth
• Shin Kyung-sook 2008 엄마를 부탁해 (tr. Please Look After Mother)
• Jennifer Egan 2010 Out of Body from A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Patrick Senécal 2010 Contre Dieu
• William Lychack 2011 "Stolpestad" and "Griswald" in The Architect of Flowers
• Erin Morgenstern 2011 "The Night Circus"
• Charles Stross 2011 Rule 34
• Mohsin Hamid 2007 "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"

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.
• Jill Walker (2000) "Do you think you're part of this? Digital texts and the second person address" in Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa (eds.) 'Cybertext Yearbook', Jyväskylä University, pp 8-22. http://jilltxt.net/txt/do_you_think.pdf
• 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.