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A Bibliography of Second-Person Fiction and Related Critical Theory |
[full bibliography of fiction]
[selected fiction bibliography with notes] [criticism and theory bibliography]
Part Two. Novels and Short Stories.
Selected and Annotated
The following is a selected, annotated list of works of prose fiction that use the "second-person" pronoun in narrative. All of the works are either originally in English or in English translation. The annotations are not intended as analyses of the given works, but solely as an indication of the use of the "second-person" pronoun. While the annotations draw primarily upon my own readings of the texts, several also draw upon critical and expository comments made by the critics and theorists listed in the third section of this bibliography.
Aksynov, Vassily P. "Destruction of Pompeii." Partisan Review 50 (1983): 40-63.
The "you" of this text is by and large figural, standing for the generalised "one."
Atwood, Margaret. "Rape Fantasies." "Dancing Girls" and Other Stories. Toronto: Seal Books, 1978.
The "you" is addressed throughout to an undramatised but present narratee, who, until the final paragraphs, may be assumed to be one of a circle of women-friends in a bar. The piece closes with the implication that the narratee is the immanent rapist. The story is particularly interesting for the way in which processes of identification and alienation operate with regard to the "second person." Although a "second person" is explicitly addressed by the narrator (as "you"), the person addressed is not dramatised. Salvatori (1986) implies that this can facilitate reader identification with the position of the narratee, but in "Rape Fantasies" the reader does not readily take up the narratee's position. Thus, "Rape Fantasies" is suggestive of the ways in which the "second-person" pronoun's insertion into narrative might complicate processes of identification, underscoring the complex, constitutive relations in these processes of class, gender, and desire (expressly narcisism/nyalsim, and masochism/sadism).
Baker, Nicholson. Vox. London: Granta Books, 1992.
This is a telephone conversation - a phone sex story. There is some, but little, of what Colin McCabe refers to as metadiscourse (narratorial/authorial discourse that is not direct, quoted speech, but which describes or positions direct speech). It is restricted to: forms like "he said," and "she said;" forms that note pauses or sound effects, like "There was a pause" (44), or "There was a click" (42); and the final three words of the novel: "They hung up" (169). There are, however, inverted commas around every piece of speech, marking them as quoted, but in so doing, like the very fact of the metadiscourse, articulating a higher level of narrative - the level on which the narrator/editor is situated. The question of, "then, precisely who is telling this tale," is explicitly invited, even if unanswered. There is no contextualising frame narrative, no "scene setting," and on identification of the sourse/origin of the narrative. There are many passages in Vox, of course, in which one character speculates on what the other is doing, There are also, however, passages of a form of "second-person" narrative in which one or other character (most frequently the male, who takes much of the initiative in this "sex-talk") constructs a fantasy in which the "you" (on the other end of the phone) is the protagonist (see 45-57).
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot. London: Picador, 1984.
The "second-person" pronoun enters Flaubert's Parrot (a biography that unsettles the notion of the "person" and unified subjectivity by fracturing the textual, discursive relations through which the reading subject is constituted) at several points and with various functions: to directly address the narratee/reader; to figure the generalised "one" (the narrator interpolating a particular reader through implying shared knowledges/experiences); and to mobilise the travelogue "you" and the courtroom "you."
Barthelme, Frederick. "Moon Delux." The New Yorker 57 (February 15, 1982): 40-44.
This story is taken from Barthelme's collection Moon Delux. It is one of four "second-person" stories in that collection, each of which unsettles the reader through the absence of traditional strategies of fixing and making comfortable the relations of identification. This is brought about not only through the absence of sympathetic characterisation, but also through the alienating/distancing effect of the "second-person" address. In "Moon Delux," this distancing effect is compounded: the "you" becomes deeply ambiguous and fluid, simultaneously housing the narrator, the narratee/reader, and the charactor, so that the identity of the "you" and of the narrator (that is, who the "you" is addressed to, and who it is spoken by) is indeterminate.
[On reflection, I may have allowed my reading here to be too led by Hantzis' - these stories my be more easily appropriated to "normal" schemes, here that of a highly focalised narrative that therefor verges on you=disguised I/monologue. But what Hantzis says about indeterminacy here holds, I think, just no so firmly as she would have it.
Bibby, Peter. "Taking the Road Out." Imprint: The Short Story Magazine (W.A. Short Story). 8.3 (1986): 62-67.
The "you" refers itself back to the narrating voice as a displaced/disguised "first-person" narration that Bibby refers to as a "counterfeit first person." The availability of the narratee as a possible site for the "you" to settle is severely restricted by the singularity of the incident described. Bibby says about his sustained use of the "second-person" pronoun in this autobiographical story that it offers a distance from a "situation of disgust at the self," a position of "standing (raging) outside yourself ... of wanting almost to not be that person." It also makes available a perspective of judgment about things that occurred long before, suggesting that such a perspective might occur "at a time of split consciousness" (Peter Bibby, letter to researcher, 21 Jan. 1992).
Campbell, Marion. Lines of Flight. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Center Press, 1985.
The you-address used extensively throughout this "first-person" narrative is the "you" of apostrophe.
---. Not Being Mariam. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1988.
Campbell employs "second-person" narrative in the "Fragments from a Paper Witch" chapters to facilitate the reader's identification with the character, but she also describes it as an attempt to move the character (and reader) to the margins of conventional discursive relations, to slip into the "labyrinthine wings behind the lit scenes of "history" ... [the "you"] finding herself in the gaps of official narrative.... "You" (Lydia interpolated by the characters of stories in the gaps and, by extension, the readers of the "Fragments") identifies with these women left out or made monstrous by the official spectacles (Lindy Chamberline and/or Katarina Kepler)" (Marion Campbell, letter to researcher, 7 Feb. 1992).
Castro, Brian. Double-Wolf. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991.
Set across several time frames, the "present" is narrated through a "second-person" address, the "you" appearing to function on the whole as self-address (as a displaced "I"). It also, however, has characteristics of apostrophe - of an address to another - and so in spite of generally tight focalisation, the "you" address often escapes the normative fixing of reference that a displaced "I" narrative wills upon itself (that is, "you" as "I"). It makes itself available as an address to a third figure, and, through the mobilisation of the second person's rhetorical functions (the appeal to the generalised "one," the "travelogue-you," and so on), to the narratee-reader. Castro points to this opening of subject-positions when he describes the "second person" as producing "a kind of amorphousness." The pronominal shifts in Double-Wolf function as a distancing effect, as a "triangulation" of consciousness through which he is "able to adjust [narratorial] distance and response, rather like a rheostat ..." (Brian Castro, letter to researcher, 28 Apr. 1992).
Clearman, Mary. "Forby and the Mayan Maidens." The Georgia Review 34 (1980): 83-95.
In this "first-person" narrative, the "you" refers to an undramatised narratee identified through context as a psychoanalyst. This is the same diegetic "you" as that which appears in the first paragraphs of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. In Clearman's story, however, this "you" is more "present," the narrator re-invoking the figure throughout the piece so as to foreground the "talking cure" context.
Cortázar, Julio. "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris." Blow-up and Other Stories. [originally published as End of the Game and Other Stories.] New York: Pantheon Books, 1967. Trans. of "Carta a un senorita en Paris." 39-50.
This work is in epistolary form, the "second-person" pronoun functioning, in the first instance, along with the "first person" as a shifter within (representations of) "actual" communicative acts. This does not, however, preclude it from functioning more generally, facilitating and facilitated by processes of identification.
---. "A Yellow Flower." Blow-up and Other Stories. [originally published as End of the Game and Other Stories.] New York: Pantheon Books, 1967. Trans. of "Una flor amarilla." 151-62.
The I-narrator of this story addresses a dramatised "you" who, we are told, once told a story to this first narrator. This dramatised "you" regains his prior position turning the "you" address back on the first "I." The narration shifts back and forward across this relation a number of times. The "you" when it appears is always the dramatised addressee.
---. "Blow-up." Blow-up and Other Stories. [originally published as End of the Game and Other Stories.] New York: Pantheon Books, 1967. 114-31.
This short story does not deploy the "second-person" pronoun into narrative. Rather, its pertinence in this study is its explicit discussion of narrative "person." "It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing. If one might say: I will see the moon rose, or: we hurt me at the back of my eyes, and especially: you the blonde woman was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces. What the hell" (114).
---. "Usted se tendió a tu lado." Alguien que anda por ahi. 1977. [trans. as Change of Light by Gregory Rabassa, except that "Usted se tendió" is omitted).
Because of the difficulty of translating the systematic and simultaneous use of plural/formal and singular/informal second-person pronouns, the story "Usted se tendió a tu lado" has been omitted from Gregory Rabassa's translation titled Change of Light.
de Assis, Machado. Epitaph of a Small Winner. 1880. Trans. William L. Grossman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Trans. of Memorias posthumas de Braz Cubas. 1880.
Epitaph of a Small Winner is a self-reflexive novel with an "I"-narrator in which the "you" generally addresses the implied reader.
DeLillo, Don. Running Dog. London: Victor Gollancz, 1978.
DeLillo opens the novel with a short "second-person" passage. The first line, the "second-person" pronoun is suggestive of the generalised "one," but by the end on the third sentence it has become dramatised, acquiring the particularisations of a character-you.
Dos Passos, John. "The Camera Eye. (17)." U.S.A. 1938. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
Examples of a self-addressed "you" occur frequently throughout the "camera eye" vignettes of The 42 Parallel, the first volume of U.S.A. Generally, this tightly focalised disguised "I" alternates with the "first-person" singular. In the seventeenth vignette, however, where the "you" address facilitates an intimate and nostalgic identification with the you-character, it is used without this accompanying, framing "first person," and so also acquires the "second person's" characteristic slide of identity between narrator, character and narratee.
Encarnacao, John J. "Coming of Age in Australia." Joseph's Coat: An Anthology of Multicultural Writing. Ed. Peter Skrzynecki. Marrickville, N.S.W.: Hale and Iremonger, 1985. 36-39.
The narrative of "Coming of Age" shifts from "first-person" form into a "second-person" form, the "you" simultaneously signifying the displaced/disguised I-narrator and the rhetorical, generalising "one" (this general "one" referring to migrants). Encarnacao tries to explain this pronominal slide in the story itself, writing: "The you in this story has been the id in me all along. Maybe it is pride that won't permit me to cast the whole story in first person; maybe it is shame, fear or even arrogance. Perhaps this story is still premature, but it had to be written down before it was forgotten or drowned out with beer and laughter" (39).
Federman, Raymond. Take It or Leave It. New York: Fiction Collective, 1976.
Here, paradoxically, the narratee appears to turn on the teller of the tale to usurp the addresser's function in the text, addressing the narrator.
Fuentes, Carlos. A Change of Skin. Trans. Sam Hileman. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968. Trans. of Cambio de piel. 1967.
The "second-person" pronoun is used throughout this novel to indicate the "subjective projections" of a frequently unreliable I-narrator. The "you" takes the two forms of direct address to other characters and apostrophe.
---. The Death of Artemio Cruz. Trans. Sam Hileman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966. Trans. of La muerte de Artemio Cruz. 1962.
This novel is told through three narrating voices, each of which organises itself around one of the three primary pronouns, each voice figuring one third of the personality of the protagonist. The second-person, personal pronoun tú is used by a "subconscious voice" that operates as a moral guide that Fuentes describes as "a sort of guiding Virgil."
Gibson, Margaret. "Leaving." Love Stories By New Women. Eds Charleen Swansea and Barbara Campbell. Charlotte, North Carolina: Red Clay Books, 1978. 90-94.
In her thesis on "second-person" point of view, Darlene Hantzis describes this piece as being in "pure" "second-person" point of view form. The "you" simultaneously refers itself to the narrating voice, the character, and the narratee/reader: no final or fixed subject position appears available.
Hawkes, John. The Lime Twig. New York: New Directions, 1961.
In the opening pages of this novel, the implied reader is directly addressed in the "second person" several times. However, unlike the traditional form of direct, reader address (for instance, that of Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Epitaph of a Small Winner), this "you" address particularises the reader by attributing him or her with specific dramatic actions and shared experiences, so that the implied reader is not simply addressed by the text, but is inscribed into the text.
Hawthorn, Nathaniel. "The Haunted Mind." 1834. Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales. London: W.W. Norton, 1972. 55-58.
The "second-person" pronoun of this nineteenth century short story stands as a displaced "I."
Herodotus. Herodotus. c. 450 B.C. Trans. A. D. Godley. 4 vols. Cambridge: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1946.
This fourth century B.C. travelogue provides very early examples of the "travelogue you" form of "second person." See in particular: Book II, 29-30.
Houbein, Lolo. Walk a Barefoot Mile. Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1988.
Houbein says about her intermittent use of the "second-person" pronoun in this novel that it "has to do with inner monologues, where Riena takes enough distance from her first person to see herself in context. Thus a first person can have a dialogue with the second person to work things through. It also may have happened in moments of embarrassment, when distance-taking is necessary for self-preservation, or to keep unpleasant things at a distance in one's thoughts" (private letter 22.1.92). Houbein underscores Butor's conception of "second-person" narrative as functioning in this way.
Jackson, Steve, and Jan Livingstone. Daggers of Darkness. London: Puffin, 1988.
This is an example of the "self-constituting" genre of (generally adolescent) adventure story. The hero is addressed throughout as "you," the functions of this address being, firstly, to signify or "name" the hero, and secondly, to facilitate reader-character identification through an address to the (implied) reader. In a real way, the "you" also constitutes the reader in the position of narrator, not solely as a function of identification, but through the necessity of the reader to select which paths the hero takes (that is, which paragraphs to read, constituting the tale differently every time).
Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Bodley Head, 1960.
There are frequent incursions of the "second person" into Ulysses, most often as self-address in interior monologue and stream-of-consciousness passages. Note, for instance, the passage in which Stephen recalls moments of his past life (45-47).
Kennealy, Thomas. Passenger. London: Collins, 1977.
The I-narrator is a male feotus addressing an unidentified "you" narratee.
Maugham, W. Somerset. "The Beast of Burden." Selected Modern English Essays. Ed. H. Mulford. London: Oxford UP, 1925. 299-301.
This is an example of the "travelogue-you" form of the "second person," in which the "you" establishes a space which the reader is invited to adopt. The form implies that, if the reader were in this position, standing on this portion of road at this particular time of day, s/he would see or experience the scene described in the text from the point of view given in the text.
Mansfield, Katherine. "The Lady's Maid." The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Aukland, Melbourne and Oxford: OUP, 1984. 382-86..
According to MF, this is a conversation to a "you" (but not the maid's lady) - with "your" questions/voice implicit in the maid's discourse:
McEwan, Ian. "Conversation with a Cupboard Man." First Love, Last Rites. London: Picador, 1976. 75-86
The "you" addressed is an undramatised yet still diegetic figure: the "you" is a social worker being addressed by an I-narrator. This is the same deployment of the "second-person" pronoun as Salinger's in Catcher in the Rye, albeit more intrusive in this story - the social worker functions as a "felt presence" that constitutes one of the controlling limit of the story itself.
McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. London: Fontana, 1986.
This ostensibly post-modernist text (which, as a "rite of passage," in fact yearns for a modernist closure and unity of self) is a sustained "second-person" narrative, the "second-person" pronoun functioning to constitute character in the same way as the (omitted) proper name. The character addressed as "you" exhibits the characteristics of the displaced/disguised "first-person" narrator.
Merwin, W.S. The Miner's Pale Children. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
This is a collection of short prose pieces (averaging two-three pages apiece), at least fourteen of which (of over eighty) employ second-person modes. All of these pieces are allegorical in tone/character. The following stories employ some form of the "second person."
"The Bar" (6-7); Make This Simple Test" (17-19); "Spiders I Have Known" (34-35); "Forgetting" (56-58) [employs the plural, "we"]; "Marietta" (59-64) [iterative/guidebook/allegorical]; "Unchopping a Tree" (85-88); "The Dark Sower" (99-101); "The Second Person" (116-17); "The Answers" (124-43); "Greeting to be Addressed to the Dead on the Morning of Their Fifth Year" (145-46); "The Eight Cakes" (161-62); "The Smell of Cold Soup" (164-65); "A Garden" (213-14); and "The Bandage" (215-16).
Morse, Ruth. "A Journey." Meanjin 47 (1988): 75-80.
The "you" is ambiguous and fluid, simultaneously and variously constituting its reference as the narrating voice, the character and the narratee.
Naylor, Gloria. "Lucielia Louise Turner." The Women of Brewster Place. London: Methuen, 1987. PAGES.
One small instance, which offers a very brief moment of figural that slides into a remotely narrativised you.
Nowra, Louis. Palu. Sydney: Picador, 1987.
The "first-person" narrator of Palu uses the "second-person" pronoun throughout the text to refer, alternately, to a gecko on her cell wall (which performs for her the role of confessor) and to her husband (who is her nemesis). Both are also spoken about in the "third person." Nowra describes his use of "you" as a direct appeal to the reader, the reader adopting the position of confessor and of persecutor. He also suggests that the "second-person" narrative is more of a feminine mode of narrative, and appropriate to a female narrator (Louis Nowra, letter to researcher, 25 Jan. 1992).
O'Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. New York: Walker and Company, 1951.
This texts enacts the paradox of a character addressing the narrator.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "You." The Wheel of Love. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1970. 362-87.
The dramatised "first-person" narrator of this story does not expose itself for several pages, during which time the "second-person" pronoun functions to involve the reader. Once the identity of the character apostrophised by the "second person" is made clear, however, the fluid identifications made available by a more ambiguous "second-person" form diminish.
Plath, Sylvia. "A Day In June." 1968. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. London: Faber, 1977. 247-50.
The strictly narrow focalisation and past tense of this work is characteristic of a self-reflexive, displaced/disguised "first-person" narrator, situating the "you" as belonging to both the character and to the narrative voice (as the "I" of any "first-person" narrative).
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. London: Picador, 1975.
The "second-person" pronoun is complexly deployed throughout the novel, referring variously to a character, a narratee (figured within the text), the implied reader, or the generalised "one."
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988.
The "second person" enters The Satanic Verses briefly as the "travelogue-you" when Mahound's ascent of Mount Cone is described. This "you" form invites the reader to place him/herself in the position occupied by Mahound, drawing the reader into the dramatic action (109-10).
Sarraute, Nathalie. "My Dear." The Use of Speech. Trans. Barbara Wright. New York: George Braziller, 1983. 97-106. Trans. of "Mon petit." L'usage de la parole. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1980.
The "you" is addressed by a narrator to a narratee, but in no straight-forward manner: the you-narratee collapses into the identity of the grammatical "second person" of the address "my dear" ["mon petit"]. The authorial "first-person" narrator describes a brief moment of conversation between two figures, drawing the you-narratee into the micro-drama through inviting her/him to meditate upon, to identify with, the fleeting psychological trauma of the figure addressed by "the other man" as "my dear."
Stine, R.L. Deep In The Jungle of Doom Goosebumps: Reader Beware... No. 11. New York, London and Sydney: Scholastic Inc., 1996.
This is another example of the "self-constituting" genre of adventure story. This series of popular narratives, based on horror rather than fantasy genres (and more aggressively marketed than other examples of the form), is aimed at the same pre-teen and teenage readerships as the Jackson and Livingstone "choose your own adventure" narratives, though by and large the ludic role-play element and the narrative structures of this series are far less developed.
Updike, John. "Anywhere is Where You Hang Your Hat." Writer and Persona: Character into Prose. Eds. Saunders, Charles, Robin R. Rice and Watt J. Cantillon. New York: Magraw Hill, 1970. 438-442.
An epistolary text, this piece clearly spells out its narrating situation. It also announces its own "origin" as a "found object," the story beginning with two postal-addresses framed in a rectangle with the caption: "Envelope shown in a subway poster, to illustrate the judicious use of postal-zone numbers." The piece is comprised of four "letters" that are one side of a correspondence: the replies, we are informed by another caption (a caption that has descended into the diegetic realm, the earlier self-awareness of fictionality erased so that the addresses are now regarded as belonging to actual people carrying on an actual exchange of letters), have been destroyed or lost.
Viljoen, Lettie. "Lament for Koos - fragment." A Land Apart: A South African Reader. Eds. André Brink and J.M. Coetzee. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987. 175-78.
This piece illustrates how the "you-address" functions in interior monologue. "I am a diffident, timid woman. Your values and judgments I made mine. (Mine, all mine). And now you are gone.... An increasing number of our former friends seem to be getting disillusioned with our (lovely) town. As you my husband experienced the town as unbearable and a dangerous dead-end. They move to the city or to the North, or withdraw in isolation, but no-one so far has had your courage to move completely outside the catchment of the hated system" (175, 176).
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday. London: Cape, 1973.
The "you" narratee addressed in Breakfast of Champions is, for the most part, the implied reader, but at several points a paradoxical and metafictional narrating situation is figured when the protagonist addresses the ostensibly objective, undramatised narrator as "you."
Welty, Eudora. "Powerhouse." 1969. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. 2nd ed. Ed. R.V. Cassill. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1981. 1429-39.
The accusatory and confronting figural form of "second-person" narrative is so extensive and insistent in this piece that it threatens to slide into its narrative form.
White, Patrick. The Living and The Dead. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962.
White deploys the "second-person" pronoun within this predominantly "third-person" novel to figure the generalised "one," but most often to mark a character's heightened self-reflexivity. At these moments, such shifts from s/he to you also draw the reader into the text, not directly addressing the narratee, but facilitating a more intimate identification with the protagonist.
Winterson, Jeanette. Written on the Body. London: Vintage, 1992.
This is an instance of a "first-person" narrator addressing a you-character, a lost lover (as apostrophe. [It has a far stronger sense of apostrophe than Olshan's Nightswimmer, which at times has the character of epistolary's direct address]).
Yourcenar, Marguerite. Alexis. 1929. Trans. Walter Kaiser. London: Harvill-HarperCollinsPublishers, 1993. Trans. of Alexis ou le Traité du Vain Combat.
Alexis ou le Traité du Vain Combat, which translates as Alexis, or the Treatise of Vain Struggle, is an example of the address mode, and is published with a Preface by the author that is dated 1963.
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