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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 Three. Primary Critical and Theoretical Texts
The third section of this bibliography selects and partially annotates critical and theoretical essays about the "second-person" pronoun in narrative fiction.
Bolinger, Dwight. "To Catch a Metaphor: You as Norm." American Speech 54 (1979): 194-209.
Bonheim, Helmut. "Narration in the Second-Person." Recherches Anglaises et Americaines. 16 (1983): 69-80.
Bonheim defines "second-person" narrative in terms of the frequency of the "you" address. "You narration proper," he writes, "takes place when the 'you' is used over such large stretches of text that the narrative effect is essentially altered" (73-74). He lays out the terms across which the "second person" moves in complex relations, describing it as "a Protean shape-shifter, sometimes a neutral 'one,' sometimes an addressee, within the fictive world or outside it," and sometimes a dramatised I, a "special case of the [interior] monologue" (79). Significantly, Bonheim does not define this "referential slither" or "sloppy identity" between narratee, character, and narrator as exclusive to "second-person" narrative. He identifies some "first" and "third person" texts that employ similar strategies of fracturing positions of identification through pronominal slippage, and proposes that the value of exploring the anomalous and experimental "second-person" form is that it may contribute to critical understanding of "first" and "third-person" forms. Bonheim's theoretical position is that of Anglo-American Practical Criticism, and the general terms of his discussion are whether the narrating situations and characters of "second-person" narratives are believable. "[I]f one tells a story to a particular person who was on the scene of action himself, the reader will naturally ask why the 'you' needs to be told what he must already know" (76). He concludes that "it is difficult to find a believable explanation" for such narrative (77). Bonheim's arguments marginalise the "second person" as a device of contrived literary experimentation. As limiting as his discussion is, however, Bonheim does provide a valuable bibliographical source for many forms of "second-person" narrative in Canadian fiction.
---. "Connative Solicitude and the Anaphoric Pronoun in the Canadian Short story." Sprachtheorie und angewandte Linguistik. Festschrift fur Alfred Wollmann zum 60. Ed. Werner Wolte. Tubinger Beiträge zur Linguistik, 195. Tubingen: Narr, 1982. 77-86.
--- Literary Systematics. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990.
Capecci, John. "Performing the Second Person." Text and Performance Quarterly 1 (1989): 42-52.
Capecci defines "second-person" narrative not in terms of constitutive features or functions, but in terms of a communication model, implicitly defining the reading of a literary text as the "performance" of a communicative act. Positioning the speaker of the "you" as a "first-person" narrator, Capecci defines the "you" as an address to either a generalised audience (Capecci's "generalised you" form), the actual or implied audience (his "specific external-you" form), another character (his "specific internal-you" form), or the actor's self (the "disguised-I you" form that functions as interior monologue). Capecci's purpose, essentially, is to indicate those matters that a dramatic actor must consider when interpreting a "second person" text for a staged performance. His premise is that the actor must interpret the nature of the relationship between the character being performed and the "you" which that character enounces. He identifies the degree of specificity of the "you" address as central to its effect (on the reader/audience), suggesting that the more specific and exclusive the address (that is, the easier it is to identify the agent specified by the "you," and the more settled and comfortable the reader's identification with that "you"), the less "deep" the effect will be. Beyond the ambiguity that he shows to be typical of the relation between the addressee and the addressor in the slide from "I" to "you" and back, however, is vague about the nature of these effects.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel. "From Cultural Provocation to Narrative Cooperation: Innovative Uses of the Second Person in Raymond Federman's Fiction." Style 28.3 (1994): 411-31.
Cortrupi, C. Nella. "Hypermetafiction: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller." Style 25.2 (1991): 280-90.
Costello, Bonnie. "John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader." Contemporary Literature 23.4 (1982): 493-514.
Costello concerns herself primarily with the ways in which the "second-person" pronoun functions in relation to the reader in Ashbery's poetry, and although she does not articulate a definition of "second-person" narrative, many of her comments have clear relevance to the present discussion. Firstly, she proposes that enunciations of "you" perform acts of phatic communication, and that the very fact of these communicative acts, as gestures, operate as the reward or consolation for the modern text's loss of "meaning" and ability to articulate "truth." Secondly, Costello notes that the actual reader is frequently brought into the text through the function of direct address. The reader, Costello writes, does not feel that s/he is overhearing a confession, but rather, inscribed into the text through this direct address, becomes an "internal audience." This inscription of the reader becomes most clearly seen when the text describes its own readers and the processes of reception (for instance, as does Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller). This inscription, however, is always in some sense a closure. Inscribing a reader like this "makes him as a fiction, a puppet to be acted on symbolically, with the hopes that this magic will penetrate to the heart of the actual reader" (499). Thirdly, Costello says that "you" serves the functions of syntactic counterword, erotic partner, and re-imagined self. Developing the notion of the re-imagined self, Costello points to the way in which the "second-person" pronoun reaches out uncannily as a "memory" that needs to be returned or "narrated over." This invites an exploration of "second-person" narrative in terms of the Freudian theory of the Uncanny, in which a thing's power to unsettle the viewer/reader is that it is simultaneously familiar and strange/unknown. The value of this article is its engagement with the "second-person" address as a function of literature, not merely as a style.
de Haard, Eric. "Notes on Second-Person Fiction: Tolstoj's First Sebastopol' Story." Semantic Analysis of Literary Texts: To Honour Jan van der Eng on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. Ed. Eric de Haard, Thomas Langerak, and Willem G. Weststeijn. New York: Elsevier, 1990. 257-74.
Delgado Gómez, Angel. "La autobiografia y la segunda persona: El lector del Guzman de Alfarache." Revista Chilena de Literatura 27/28 (1986): 77-91.
Delgado Gómez discusses the functions of the informal "second-person" address [tú] in Mateo Aleman's seventeenth century, autobiographical novel Guzman de Alfarache. He proposes that the "second person's" two central functions are to entertain and to moralise, and that the novel takes the form of a sometimes bawdy, sometimes didactic discussion between the narrator, Guzman, and an anonymous, silent, omnipresent and multiform narratee. Guzman's attitude to this "you" narratee, Delgado Gómez says, varies from flattery through intimacy and friendliness to apology, admonition, and insult, and assumes, alternately, a reader who appreciates a picaresque tale and a parishioner listening to a religious sermon. Delgado Gómez describes the "object of this study [as] an analysis of this curious narratee, and its function in the work, in so far as it affects the content at the same time as it affects the narrative form" (77).
Fludernik, Monika. "Second-Person Narrative and Related Issues." Style 28.3 (1994): 281-311.
---. "Second-Person Narrative as a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism. Style 28.3 (1994): 445-379.
---. "Pronouns of Address and 'Odd' Third Person Froms: The Mechanics of Involvement in Fiction." New Essays on Deixis. Ed Keith Green. Forthcoming.
---. "Second Person Fiction: Narrative YOU as Addressee and/or Protagonist." Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik [AAA] 18 (1993): 217-47.
Gault, Pierre. "Genesis and Function of Hencher in The Lime Twig." Les Americanistes: New French Criticism and Modern American Fiction. Ed. Ira D. Jonhson and C. Johnson. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kenniket P, 1978. 138-55.
Gault suggests that the "second-person" pronoun functions generally as an aggressive, direct address to the reader, and implies that the aggressivity of this address hinders reader-character identification by underscoring the externality of the reader to the text. He complicates this, however, by showing that when dramatic action and speech are ascribed to the "you," the "second person" can acquire a second, simultaneous but contradictory function of facilitating processes of identification. This is brought about by the way in which the "you" address inscribes the reader into the text. To function in this way, Gault states, the dramatic action must remain generalised and consist solely of gestures and incidents that the (implied) reader will recognise as ordinary: particularity of incident, more precise detail, and greater intimacy or specificity, on the other hand, work against this second function, because the reader will find "identification... more difficult to accept" (139). Gault says that Hawkes, having introduced an increasingly detailed - and therefore increasingly alienating - dramatised "you," attempts to refacilitate reader-character identification by turning the "you" address into a game. The "you" is given a succession of identities that capture the reader in a ludic slide of identities. "Playing the game [of The Lime Twig] necessitates refusing to settle in any easy identification. It requires [from the reader] the effort of willing to be anyone" (140). Gault explains the text's strategy as being to inscribe/constitute the reader in the text as the necessary and legitimating Other guaranteeing the subject-status of Hencher: the character (Hencher) needs a prior and legitimating Other in order to constitute itself as a speaking subject. It must, in fact, have an Other to speak to. Gault's methodology is a formalist, close textual analysis that discusses the narrative functions of several features of The Lime Twig, the first of these functions being the "second person." The values of this article are its insight into the ludic quality of the "second person's" fluid subject positions, and its consideration of the function of the inscribed reader/"you" in establishing a legitimating Other for the text's central voice or point of view.
Green, Keith, and Jill LeBihan. "The Speaking Object: Daphne Marlatt's Pronouns and Lesbian Poetics." Style 28.3 (1994): 432-44.
Hantzis, Darlene Marie. "You Are About To Begin Reading": The Nature and Function of Second Person Point of View in Narrative. Diss. Louisiana State U, 1988. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1992. DA 8904541.
The project of Hantzis' thesis is to define "second-person" point of view, which she sees as being discrete from "first" and "third-person" points of view. She stipulates that while the "I" in "first person" and the "she"/"he" in "third person" have fixed, determinate identities, the identity of the "you" in "second-person" point of view is indeterminate and will slide more or less freely across three referents: a dramatised character; the narrator (in the form of a disguised self-address); and the narratee (whether as the implied reader or a textual narratee as in Ring Lardner's "Haircut"). She defines this indeterminacy as intrinsic to "second-person" point of view, and proposes that the form necessarily represents a world that reflects a concern with the collapse of autonomous subjectivity and textual authority. Hantzis draws extensively on speech act theory, stipulating that any definition of "second-person" narrative necessarily involves a clear definition of the communicative situation figured by the text: the "you" address of a "second-person" narrative, she states, draws explicit attention to its particular narrating situation. Primarily, however, Hantzis' extended study rises from the Anglo-American New Critical methodology, and assumes both a mimeticist/reflectionist view of language (in spite of her seeming wish to move to a view of literature as constitutive rather than reflective) and a highly psychologistic, spatial and temporal definition of the metaphor of point of view (implicitly standing an "actual" person in a space constituted by and specified within the text).
- - -. "'You Are About To Begin Reading': The Nature and Function of Second Person Point of View in Narrative." Dissertation Abstracts International 49.12 (1989): 3550A. Louisiana State U.
Herman, David. "Textual You and Double Deixis in Edna O'Brien's A Pagan Place." Style 28.3 (1994): 378-410.
Holden, Jonathan. "The Abuse of the "second-person" pronoun." The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. 38-56.
Holden implicitly defines "second-person" narrative as fluid and indeterminate, clearly identifying the deep ambiguity of the identity of the "you," but he immediately criticises this "deployment, in poem after poem, of an ambiguous 'you' that could refer to the reader, that could convey the third-person singular sense of 'one,' or that could be the poet - the narrator - . . ." (38). Holden regards this "blurred you" as a mark of poor poetry. He insists that the "you" must have a definite and clear referent: the poet must make it clear who s/he or the narrator is speaking to. Holden points to the way the "second person" lends itself to a rhetoric of recitation, usefully invoking Northrope Frye's notions of "lyric" and epos as forms or "radicals" of literary presentation. He goes on, however, to privilege the written over the spoken - "literature" over "oration" - asserting that a poem that employs the "second person" can only work well when performed publicly with the "you" addressed to the audience. The "second person" has no proper place, he says, in lyric, testimonial or narrative poetry: he assumes that the literary is necessarily a written form, and that the "second person," which he defines as oratory, is therefore lesser literature. He concludes by proposing that the only proper role for the "second-person" pronoun in poetry is that of address in public performance: it can only properly address a (present) audience.
Hopkins, Mary Francis, and Leon Perkins. "Second-Person Point of View." Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Vol. 1. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem P, 1981. 119-32. 6 vols.
Hopkins and Perkins systematically define "pure" "second-person" narrative by elucidating its characteristics, framing their discussion in the traditional critical terms of point of view. They demonstrate that "second-person" point of view can be as multiple and varied as "first person" and "third person," illustrating this through identifying categories such as "second-person-limited omniscience," "second-person-personal," and "second-person-impersonal centre of consciousness." They propose that the "you" of "second-person" point of view must refer to an actant, and that there must be evidence of "dual time" - of the time of telling and the time of the events narrated. Defining "second-person" point of view in this way leads Hopkins and Perkins to set apostrophe aside as not properly belonging to this form. After Culler, they define apostrophe as a meditation encompassing the set of all possible nows: apostrophe, therefore, does not exhibit dual time, and so is not, properly, a narrative form (123). Significantly, they also note that an "I" narrator does not necessarily disqualify a text from being categorised as a "second-person" narrative.
Jefferson, Ann. The Nouveau Roman And the Poetics of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.
Jefferson implies that "second-person" narrative hinders processes of identification and alienates the reader from the text. It does this, firstly, by foregrounding the communicative element: to "introduce a second person into a novel is, in the first place, simply to acknowledge that all narratives are addressed to a reader" (157). Secondly, it alienates the reader by not offering her or him a stable subject position within the text. Jefferson argues that the crisis in reading fiction generated in the 1950's by the nouveau roman - a crisis over the nature of fictional discourse and over whether narrative fiction can any longer relay the certainties of truth - has instituted a shift in the poetics of the novel and of fiction. In exploring this shift, Jefferson discusses the general uses of the "second-person" pronoun in the nouveau roman. She looks specifically at Sarraute's collapse of narrative pronoun to undercut traditional, reflectionist conceptions of character and point of view (in which positions of subjectivity are continually fractured), and Butor's use in La Modification and Degrés of the "second-person's" didacticism (in which this didactic function, in Butor's own explanation, underscores a gap between a state of being and its recognition: a gap that articulates an inability to know the subject).
Kacandes, Irene. "Narrative Apostrophe: Reading, Rhetoric, Resistance in Michel Butor's La Modification and Julio Cortázar's "Graffiti." Style 28.3 (1994): 329-49.
---. Narrative Apostrophe: Case Studies in Second Person Fiction. Diss. Harvard U, 1991. Ann Arbor: UMI 1993. DA 9123031.
The following is a copy of Irene Kacandes's own abstract:
This dissertation explores "you" as the pronoun of relationship, arguing that it extends an irresistible invitation to the receiver of a discourse. Although we have been trained as readers to ignore this relational imperative in discourse enclosed in quotation marks, many uses of second person in fiction have no such boundaries and therefore invite the reader to feel addressed, even when s/he can deduce the presence of another addressee. I analyse factors which promote or inhibit such identification, applying the term "narrative apostrophe," for example, to uses of the second person in which sender and receiver are not on the same ontological plane and therefore cannot talk or listen directly to one another.
In my opening chapter on Michel Butor's La Modification I document reader response to what has been called the "second person novel." In the second chapter I survey the critical discussions of the subject and propose a comparison of various uses of the second person according to "reversibility," the extent to which the sender and receiver are actually in communication with one another and could exchange roles. Dialogue marks one end of the spectrum (total reversibility possible) and you as "one," the other (since a generalised "you" cannot be a conversation partner).
The final three chapters move along the spectrum of reversibility, from the more dialogic toward the apostrophic, exploring various factors which influence the flow of communication. My third chapter interprets the ubiquitous presence of second person phrases in Modern Greek prose as evidence of writers' attempts to bridge the gap between sender and receiver opened up by literacy. The penultimate chapter focuses on the dynamics of the apostrophic gesture, particularly as a resuscitative act, in Gunter Grass's Cat and Mouse. In my final chapter on the frame story of Italo Calvino's If on a winters night a traveller, I discuss genderisation as a block to felicitous identification between actual reader and the inscribed reader. In a brief epilogue I consider two works of contemporary American fiction which exploit second person narration to render the splitting of self caused by cocaine addiction.
---. "Narrative Apostrophe: Case Studies in Second Person Fiction." Dissertation Abstracts International. 52.3 (1991): 906A. Harvard U.P.
---. "Orality, Reader Address and 'Anonymous You:' On Translating Second Person References from Modern Greek Prose." Journal of Modern Greek Studies 8 (1990): 223-43.
---. "Are You in the Text? The 'Literary Performative' in Postmodernist Fiction." Text and Performance Quarterly 13 (1993): 139-53.
Leiris, Michel. Afterword. "Le Réalisme Mythologique De Michel Butor." 1958. La Modification. By Michel Butor. Paris: 18/10, 1975. 285-312.
Leiris proposes that "second-person" narrative not only implicates the reader within the narrative, but that it lends a kind of photographic realism to the text. He suggests that Butor's use of the "second-person" pronoun is informed by its use in scholarly writing in which it is used to question and unravel problems (for instance, Plato's Socratic discourses), so that La Modification becomes a protracted dissertation or interrogation. Leiris also notes the ways in which the narrative moves at times into "first" and "third-person" modes, figuring a play between the cultural and the personal, and between exteriority and interiority, which he sees as a central dynamic of the "second person." The article is essentially a critical but popularist exposition of the novel, and engages with Butor's use of the "second person" not only at the level of narrative analysis, but also as a re-enactment of that novel's "you" address to the reader. The first paragraphs of the article almost presage the opening of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Leiris speaking of the feel of the novel in one's hands: "it is yourself, reader, that the writer seems to politely challenge and it only takes a few brief glances over the printed lines while you handle the paper-knife in order to sense that you are in the presence of an invitation, or else a summons/warning" (285).
Margolin, Uri. "Narrative 'You' Revisited." Manuscript copy. [forethcoming in Language and Style]
McHale, Brian. "'You Used to Know What These Words Mean': Misreading Gravity's Rainbow." Language and Style: An International Journal 18.1 (1985): 93-118.
McHale defines the "second person" as possessing an interpolative function and as being ontologically destabilising. He contends, firstly, that reiteration of "you," even where the "you" does not refer to a reader or narratee, tends to draw the reader into the text by dint of the communicative act it figures. "You is a sign of dialogue, conveying some vocative appeal, some sense of address, even in its most innocent, impersonal instances, and we cannot help but respond dialogically ... " (112). Secondly, he proposes that the "second-person's" highly equivocal status (throughout Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow) articulates a radically unstable ontology and the capacity for an ambiguity (or negative capability) that, rather than hindering meaning-making, is productive of meaning and sense. He describes the "second person" as being characterised, on the one hand, by an identity that is fluid and indeterminate, and on the other, by a corresponding and simultaneous need for a stable and clear identity. This (always resisted) movement toward a settled identity is generated through the way in which every enunciation of the "you" foregrounds a communicative act and requires us to identify the participants in that act so as to establish sense: any utterance of the "second-person" pronoun conventionally invites the reader to identify the addressor and addressee and to reconstruct the communicative circuit that joins them (95). McHale borrows the notion of negative capability from Keats, presenting it as a function of literary texts that is defined in opposition to critical certitude (a fixing and certainty of meaning). Critics who fix both the referent and the speaker of the "you" in any instance of discourse with unequivocal identity are making a bid for certitude and for the verities of a reasonable, mimetic world - a world which may not, ultimately, be available in Gravity's Rainbow, in part because of the destabilising function of the "second person." McHale draws heavily but critically on Banfield, disagreeing with her at the point at which she moves to dismantle the communications model of narrative. McHale declares his reluctance to move away from the communications model and its assumptions. His analysis of Gravity's Rainbow explicates five communicative relationships between any text's narrator, narratee and character/s, and describes these as being the identities across which the "you" travels. These relationships are: narrator-addressor to narratee-addressee (a metanarrative form in which the narrator speaks to the narratee); narrator-addressor to character-addressee (in which the narrator speaks rhetorically or actually to one of his/her characters, often as an aside or in an apostrophe); charactera-addressor to characterb-addressee (in which one character speaks to another); self-addressed interior dialogue (in which a character or narrator speaks to him/herself; and the colloquial-you that means "one." This article, which is one of the more important and extended discussions of "second-person" narrative, is most valuable for its illustrations of narrator-narratee-character relations, its discussion of the "second person's" fluid identity as possessing an ontological function, and the way in which it extends discussions about "second-person" narrative into texts that do not deploy it as the dominant mode of narrative: that is, texts usually considered as being "first" or "third-person" narratives.
Morrissette, Bruce. "Narrative 'You' In Contemporary Fiction." Comparative Literature Studies 2.1 (1965): 1-24.
Morrissette defines "second-person" narrative essentially as a rhetorical figure that functions to generalise, moralise, axiomise, judge, reproach, lecture, and so on. He provides a brief survey of "second-person" texts with illustrations of a "proliferation of 'you' forms, [all of which] have a rhetorical cast, which never, in fact, disappears entirely from the mode, even when it becomes unmistakably narrative" (10). As well as the narrative form, which he discusses in terms of Stout's How Like a God and Butor's La Modification, he describes the guidebook "you," cookbook "you," journalistic "you," advertising "you," and courtroom "you" forms. He also outlines the various positions the "you" may hold in relation to its speaker and its referent within literary texts. Morrissette's is the first significant work that treats "second-person" narrative as a critical and theoretical problem. He identifies his own concerns as being the "structural, esthetic and metaphysical significance of second-person technique" (2). The formalism of its project masks several of the assumptions of the New Critical methodology Morrissette works from (for instance, assumptions concerning the nature of textuality and the text's relation to an actual world). He identifies La Modification, which he discusses at length, as generating the growth of interest in the form, but cites works by Browning, Hemingway, Faulkner and Stout to demonstrate it as being established before the 1950's.
Nance, Kimberly A. "Self-Consuming Second-Person Fiction: José Emilio Pacheco's 'Tarde de agosto' ('August Afternoon')." Style 28.3 (1994): 366-77.
Oppenheim, Louis. Intentionality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Study of Butor's La Modification. French Forum Monographs 16. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, Publishers: 1980.
Oppenheim suggests that "second-person" narrative complexly provokes the reader's participation in the novel in an ambiguous reader-narrator-character relationship in which the reader oscillates in identifying between the implied reader (and the experience of being addressed directly by the "you"), the voice speaking the "you," and the you-character (33). In relation to this last function, the "second person" not only facilitates the reader's identification with the character, but implicates the reader in the existential experience constituted by the text and attributed to that character (32). The reader of La Modification, Oppenheim suggests, becomes the protagonist, constituting "reality" through Butor's projection of "the intentional experience" of the protagonist. He says that Butor invites the readers of his text to conceive of it "on the level of a human act - as opposed to a representation of a prior experience -" implicating the reader in the constitution of reality (36). He further argues that the "vous" simultaneously manifests the protagonist's interior voice (as a displaced "je" ["I"]), and the exterior voice of a narrator-author/reader. (Oppenheim's habit of collapsing the writer into the narrator needs to be noted: phenomenology, in referring the literary critic to the intentionalising consciousness of the writer, invites such a collapse. It is necessary, however, to avoid that unhelpful collapse of figures: the categories must remain clearly delineated). Oppenheim also discusses the admonishing, didactic affect of "second-person" narrative, explaining that the "second person" functions in La Modification as a "récit didactique" in which the teaching specifically concerns the progress and awakening of the protagonist's (and thus of the involved reader's) consciousness. He discusses the use of "second-person" narrative in depth in terms of the intentionality of language and the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity.
Passias, Katherine. "Deep and Surface Structure of the Narrative Person Vous in Butor's La Modification and its Relationship to Free Indirect Style." Language and Style 9.3 (1976): 197-212.
Passias describes the "second-person" pronoun has possessing two grammatical functions: the illocutionary (which is characterised by a direct address to the reader) and the collective (characterised by an address to a general readership). The grammatical function that dominates depends on the reader's experience, degree of identification with the "you" being addressed, and whether the reader feels directly (and personally) or generally addressed. It loses both functions of address to the reader, however, when "a very personal experience" is described. That is, if the "second-person" address becomes highly particular and exclusive, Passias states, neither of the functions can dominate (199). The implication of this is that, for Passias, the "second-person" pronoun loses its function as address when it becomes a referent of a character or actant within a narrative. In such instances, she states, the you becomes I, an I speaking (at the "surface" level of the text) to him or herself and not addressing a reader. She adds, however, that both functions must nevertheless be present as a residue: narration is always an address to a listener/reader. The surface pronouns don't alter this underlying relationship between author, reader and text. This work explores "second-person" narrative - and its relation to direct discourse, free direct discourse, indirect discourse, and free indirect discourse - through the formalist methodology of linguistic/literary analysis. Passias assumes that literary texts function as communicative acts, and takes these acts as functioning in a straight-forward manner between the author and the reader. Consequently, neither the narrator, narratee nor implied reader are acknowledged, nor is any distinction made between the reader and the narratee.
Phelan, James. "Self-Help for Narratee and Narrative Audience: How 'I' - and 'You'? - Read 'How'." Style 28.3 (1994): 350-65.
Richardson, Brian. "I etcetera: On the Poetics and Ideology of Multipersoned Narratives." Style 28.3 (1994): 312-28.
---. "The Poetics and Politics of Second Person Narrative." Genre 24.3 (1991): 309-30.
Salvatori, Mariolina. "Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveller: Writer's Authority, Reader's Autonomy." Contemporary Literature 27.2 (1986): 182-212.
Salvatori implies that the "second-person" address possesses an interpolative function that is undone or split once the "you" becomes characterised/particularised. He describes the way in which the dramatisation of a "you" character dissipates the initial identity (invited by the aggressive "you" address) between "you" and the reader: the particularised "you" character separates from a text's readers to become a "you-other-than-ourselves." That is, it becomes an element that is addressed along side us at any instance of the "you," an element that we may, or may not, collapse back into through identification. He states that at the "moment the 'you' becomes a character in the novel, that 'you' becomes differentiated from us, that differentiation increasing or decreasing according to the way in which one thinks of oneself as a reader" - that is, according to how closely we identify with the Reader's reading practice (169, n.15). Salvatori discusses the uses of the "second-person" pronoun in Calvino's novel as one aspect amongst several of the problem of the writer's authority and the reader's autonomy in a text which inscribes the dynamic of that problem as a form of entrapment of the reader and as a form of closure. He also discusses at length the narrator of this novel and its relation to the "you," describing it as a "ludic-I," "an elusive, invisible, crafty puppeteer who controls the Reader's [the "you" character's] every thought" (196), and that challenges and admonishes - goads - the Reader throughout the text.
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