SECOND-PERSON NARRATIVE

'Second-person narration' is a narrative technique 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".

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. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. —Opening lines of Jay McInerney's ''Bright Lights, Big City'' (1985)

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, Choose Your Own Adventure series of novels, pop song lyrics, advertisements, etc.
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 not insignificant 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, Jay McInerney, etc., 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).

Contents

List of second-person narratives

See also

External links

List of second-person narratives

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

★ Simon Armitage 1999 ''All Points North''

★ Iain Banks 1997 ''A Song of Stone''

★ Samuel Beckett 1979 ''Company''

★ 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'')

★ Marguerite Duras 1982 ''La Maladie de la mort'' (tr. ''Malady of Death'')

★ Nuruddin Farah 1986 ''Maps''

★ William Faulkner 1936 ''Absalom, Absalom!''

★ Carlos Fuentes 1962 ''Aura'' (tr. ''Aura'')

★ Günter Grass 1961 ''Katz und Maus'' (tr. ''Cat and Mouse'')

★ Sunetra Gupta 1993 ''The Glassblower's Breath''

★ Nathaniel Hawthorne 1835 "The Haunted Mind" in ''Twice-Told Tales'' (1837)—

★ Jan Kjærstad 1993 ''Forføreren'' (tr. ''The Seducer)

★ Stewart O'Nan 1999 A Prayer for the Dying

★ Dennis Lehane 2004 "Until Gwen" in ''The Atlantic Monthly''

★ Karin Lowachee 2002 Warchild

★ Jay McInerney 1984 ''Bright Lights, Big City''

★ Andrew Osmond 2006 "Young British Slacker"

★ Chuck Palahniuk 2005 "Foot Work" in ''Haunted''

★ Iain Pears 2005 ''The Portrait''

★ Georges Perec 1967 ''Un homme qui dort'' (tr. ''A Man Asleep'')

★ Tom Robbins 1994 ''Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas''

★ Keith Roberts 1980 ''Molly Zero''

★ David Foster Wallace 1999 "Forever Overhead"in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men''

★ Jeff VanderMeer 2003 ''Veniss Underground''

★ Gao Xingjian 1990 ''Ling Shan'' (tr. ''Soul Mountain'')

★ Lorrie Moore 1985 ''Self-Help'' (six of the nine short stories are second-person narratives)

★ John Updike ''How to love America and leave it at the same time'' in '' 2003

★ Robert O'Connor 1994 ''Buffalo Soldiers''

★ Ian Rankin "Glimmer" (Reprinted in the short story anthology ''Beggars Banquet'')

See also

★ Point of view (literature)

★ Narrator

External links

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