Introduction: second-person narrative and related issues - Second-Person Narrative

Style, Fall, 1994 by Monika Fludernik

In what follows I will review a few of the definitions that have so far been proposed for second-person narrative, explaining their assets and disadvantages and the special perspective from which they were developed. An appropriate beginning is Gerald Prince's dictionary definition of "second-person narrative":

A narrative the NARRATEE of which is the PROTAGONIST in the story s/he is told. Butor's A Change of Heart is a second-person narrative. [paragraph] Genette 1983; Morrissette 1965; Prince 1982. (Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology 84)

Prince quotes the classic study on second-person fiction, Bruce Morrissette's "Narrative 'You' in Contemporary Literature," which refrains from a specific definition of "you" narrative, mentioning Michel Butor's La modification (1957), Rex Stout's How like a God (1929), and John Ashmead's The Mountain and the Feather (1961) as the only consistent second-person texts. Morrissette is mainly interested in tracing models for the technique and documenting its proliferations in twentieth-century literature and some films, and he notes some striking prefigurations of the second-person form in Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner (Absalom Absalom!), Robert Penn Warren, and others.

Mary Frances Hopkins and Leon Perkins in their 1981 article "Second Person Point of View in Narrative" straightforwardly characterize the narrative "you" as "an actant by definition" and therefore "internal to the story" (whereas the addressee in most third-person narratives is external to the story), but they go on to note that "the relationships of this 'you' to the external reader may vary within the text, providing a source of complexity in the texture of the story" (121). Hopkins and Perkins particularly insist on the reportative character of second-person narrative and on the specificity of the actions of the "you" protagonist: "The you-utterance is neither command nor accusation, nor yet generalization, but report" (122). (Hopkins and Perkins here distance themselves from Morrissette.) The authors also note the frequent use of the narrative present in second-person fiction, and they eliminate (poetic) apostrophe on the grounds that it lacks a "dual time," the necessary duality between the time of narration and that of the story narrated. Hopkins and Perkins, moreover, discuss various different types of focalization in second-person narrative. Thus, Mary McCarthy's "The Genial Host" is described as "second-person, limited omniscience" (125) and Rumer Godden's "You Need to Go Upstairs" as "second-person-personal," with the authors proposing that "[t]he narrator is entirely within the protagonist" (127). Hopkins and Perkins conclude that "[t]he only major narrative effect denied this mode [i.e., second-person fiction] is the 'absent narrator'" (131).(4)

It is unfortunate that Prince's dictionary fails to mention this important article. His two other references are entirely misleading: neither Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse Revisited (the 1983 date refers to the French original) nor Prince's own Narratology devote any reasonable space to second-person fiction. Genette (133-34) subsumes second-person narrative (which he calls a "rare but very simple case" [133]) under heterodiegesis and moves on to the issue of plural forms of narrative "person" both in the homo- and the heterodiegetic realms. Prince's own discussion of the issue consists in presenting an invented two-sentence passage and noting that "we learn nothing explicit about the narratee as such, except that he takes part in the events recounted to him: we do not know what he thinks of these events as he is told them; we do not perceive what his attitude towards the narrator and his narration is; and so on and so forth" (17).