You are about to read a blog post about second person narrative address. The very phrase makes your eyes heavy and you wander to your bed and have a little lie down. Just for a moment. You don’t intend to sleep, just to rest your eyes. But that phrase “second person narrative address” latches onto your wrist and pulls you downward until you float just under the surface of consciousness. And now you’re dreaming about a large fish, and the fish is trying to talk to you about its knees, which it seems to have lost. This is a shame (the sleeping, not the knee thing), because this was going to be an interesting post.
As you can tell, the trouble with the use of the second person in narrative is that it’s often cute. And not in a good way.
It’s also not easy to pin down. Clearly it’s about a narrator saying “you” in some way, but what “you” means here can vary quite widely. Here are a few of the ways it works.
Dear Reader
This convention is probably the oldest and perhaps the most common form of second person address. The narrator breaks the ‘fourth wall’ of the tale to talk to his reader. In doing so he exposes its artifice. Suddenly the story is revealed as a story, and the narrator as a version of the author. Generally, the convention is that the reader is a typification — a wise but generic everyman. Here’s Henry Fielding in Tom Jones discussing his writing strategy with regard to Squire Allworthy:
Matters of a much more extraordinary kind are to be the subject of this history, or I should grossly mis-spend my time in writing so voluminous a work; and you, my sagacious friend, might with equal profit and pleasure travel through some pages which certain droll authors have been facetiously pleased to call The History of England.
Of course, a soon as the narrator speaks directly to us, he becomes a layer in the fiction — a character (and we must create a new layer in order to imagine the real Fielding conjuring his narrative avatar.. But that’s a whole other thing). By the same token we remain a generic ‘sagacious’ reader.
My favourite modern example of this (albeit one that does not invoke ‘you’) is by Douglas Adams in his novel So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
“This Arthur Dent,” comes the cry from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, and has even now been found inscribed on a deep space probe thought to originate from an alien galaxy at a distance too hideous to contemplate, “what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”
Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.
As in theatre, this kind of direct address highlights the fictive nature of the narrative, and it calls on the reader to contribute her imagination and indulgence to a shared enterprise.
Come with me now
This mode of address casts the reader as adjunct to the narrative eye. “You” and the narrator are are on a journey together, exploring the story’s world. The narrator acts as a kind of tour guide batting the fictionalised reader around like a spy balloon.
This requires a greater suspension of disbelief than Dear Reader since it sets up an opposition between the flesh and blood reader (lying on a beach, sitting in a fallout shelter, running on sand dunes) and the fictionalised version who is cast as a kind of unspeaking under-narrator.
This technique is often characterised by a pretence of agency. Don’t go there, the narrator says, it’s dangerous. Come here instead. And the reader is invited to imagine that she posseses a kind of power inside the narrative, just as the narrator withdraws it. Here is Fielding again.
Reader, take care. I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr Allworthy’s, and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck, I do not well know. However, let us e’en venture to slide down together; for Miss Bridget rings her bell, and Mr Allworthy is summoned to breakfast, where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your company.
This mode is used by Michel Faber in The Crimson Petal and the White. The implied reader is invoked as a kind of none-too-bright time traveller hopping along within the novel from character to character. “You” are informed, chivied and cajoled by the novel’s arch and all-knowing narrator.
You can come out hiding now. Make yourself comfortable, for the room is utterly dark, and will remain that way until sunrise. you could even risk, if you wish, lyind down beside Caroline, becaus once she’s asleep she’s dead to the world, and wouldn’t notice you — as long as you refrained from touching.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Here the reader has a proxy within the story. The narrator is an in-story character too, speaking to unseen listeners who have pulled up a chair in a bar, or settled down around a campfire or whatever. This makes a kind of performance of the tale.
The readers tend to appear most at the start and at the end to frame the story, with a few reminder appearances here and there as tankards are refilled and new logs are thrown on the fire.
Here’s David Mitchell’s Zachry speaking in Cloud Atlas
So you want to hear about the Great Ship o’the Prescients?
Nay, the Ship ain’t no mythy yarnin’, it was real as I am an’ you are. These here very eyes they seen it ooh, twenty times or more.
This convention goes down pretty easy except when the audience ‘speaks’. Then the narrator might perform an awkward pantomime, and repeat the question. “Yes, you may well ask about the monster,” and so on. This is the moment at which the curse of cute threatens to descend upon the tale.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is very much part of the “what’s that you say?” sub-category of Are you sitting comfortably. “You” are (probably) a CIA agent eating dinner with the protagonist. The framing scenes are knowingly mannered, with much ironic and over-polite interpretation of “your” words and signals:
Excuse me, Sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: l am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.
There. It’s there… in that “I see I have alarmed you,” expect much more of that.
You are in a dungeon, everywhere you look there are bats.
This title is stolen from old school adventure games, and the even older school Choose Your Own Adventure books by Edward Packard.
This mode is the full-blown second person narrative. The hero of the story is “you”. And that’s “you” the protagonist, not “you” the reader (though I suppose it’s possible some brave writer has combined the two).
Probably the most famous example of this is Jay McInerny’s Bright Light Big City.
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. Then again, it might not.
Some claim that this kind of narrative is tricksy and hard to read. I have to admit that I barely noticed it in Bright Lights Big City. I think this is partly because the reader is not forced into any contortions. One accepts that “you” here is almost the same as “he” in a close third person narrative, or “I” in a first person narrative, and everything flows from there. It’s also because Bright Lights Big City is a beautifully-written novel.
Lorrie Moore’s famous short story How to Talk To Your Mother (Notes) from her collection Self Help plays a slightly different game. She uses direct address in a poetic abbreviated form that plays with the kinds of notes one might jot on a calendar but is also redolent of an imperative mode, as in a set of instructions.
- Bury her in the cold south sideyard of that Halloweenish house. Your brother and his kids are there. Hug. The minister in a tweed sportscoat, the neighborless fields, the crossroads, are all like some stark Kansas. There is praying, then someone shoveling. People walk toward the cars and hug again. Get inside your car with your niece.
You are about to begin reading
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room.
I’m not sure there are many examples of this mode apart from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller itself. But this one instance is famous and interesting. This is a story in which “you” star in the framing device. You pursue a novel named If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller but succeed only in locating disparate scraps of unrelated tales. So the reader is the story and the story is the reader’s failure to find the story. Which, if you transpose writer for reader, is a good description of some of my working days.
