A Longer Definition

from
The Second Person: A Point of View?:
The Function of the Second-Person Pronoun
in Narrative Prose Fiction

"Second-person" narrative is a mode that may be defined, provisionally, as narrative in which the "second-person," personal pronoun "you" is used to identify and directly or indirectly address a protagonist. Or as Fludernik remarks, it is "narrative whose (main) protagonist is referred to by means of an address pronoun (usually you) and [which] frequently also [has] an explicit communicative level on which a narrator (speaker) tells the story of the 'you' to (sometimes) the 'you' protagonist's present-day absent or dead, wiser, self" (Fludernik, 1994b: 288). If both definitions appear vague and negotiable, they are necessarily so because of the often equivocal nature of the "second-person" pronoun within narrative discourse. Its fluidity and non-conventionality have ensured that more exclusive, categorical definitions are difficult to formulate. Darlene Hantzis, for instance, asserts that the "you" in "second-person" point of view proper will not only dominate the "third-person" pronouns that occur in any text, but will be deployed to the complete exclusion of the "first-person" narrative pronoun. Mary Francis Hopkins and Leon Perkins (1981), on the other hand, while working within the same tradition of point of view criticism as Hantzis, propose that an explicit "I" narrator does not necessarily disqualify a text from being categorised as a "pure" "second-person" point of view. Similarly, Gerald Prince's definition assumes the "you"-protagonist must always be the narratee (Prince, 1987: 84), yet Richardson more circumspectly proposes that the "you" is only "generally the work's narratee" (Richardson, 1991: 314). In fact, appreciative of the difficulties of adequately defining the "second person" as a distinct field, Richardson proceeds on the premise that the "very essence [of the "second person"] is to eschew a fixed essence" (Richardson, 1991: 311). His approach, consequently, is to enumerate tendencies that any instance of narrative-"you" may present to the reader rather than to stipulate invariant conditions, though like Fludernik, Hantzis and Prince, he too proposes that at the very least it is "narration that designates its protagonist by a second-person pronoun" (Richardson, 1991: 311). These tendencies, he writes, include present-tense narration and allegorical undertones, but most typicallyas a matter that will be taken up at length belowthe reader will be faced by an "irreducible oscillation" between the intimate voice of a "first-person" narration limited in the breadth of knowledge it can have access to, and the distant, omniscient voice of a "third-person" narration, simultaneously inviting and precluding identification with other pronominal voices (Richardson, 1991: 313). It is this characteristic oscillation that differentiates the "second-person" from types of displaced "first-" or "third-person" utterances found in authorial colloquies to a "gentle reader" (in Brontè, but Thackeray and Nabokov, too) or internalised debates and subvocal dialogues (of Beckett and Sarraute) (Richardson, 1991: 310), each of which, he writes, employs "you" in ways "easily comprehended by traditional dyadic theories of point of view" (Richardson, 1991: 311). Uri Margolin approaches the problem of defining the "second person" in a similar way listing a number of typical characteristics that he describes as necessary in defining "second-person narrative as a distinct variety of narrative discourse" (Margolin, 1997/1991: 6).

• The presence of a single global narrator on the highest level of textual embedding, such that the whole (fictional) discourse originates with him or her;
• The presence of numerous instances of "you" in his or her discourse, oral or written;
• The majority of these "you" instances refer to a narrated rather than communicative "you;"
• The speech acts of the narrator concerning the "you" thus go beyond apostrophes, questions, orders, etc. (Bühler's Appellfunktion) and tend toward the constative or representative, that is, reporting (Bühler's Darstellungsfunktion);
• The narrated you is a central agent in the sequence of events being recounted;
• The events/actions/states involving this "you" are specific and individual as regards their time and space, as opposed to the purely typical or recurrent (generic you, "you" as equivalent to "one" or "everyone"). (Margolin, 1997/1991: 6)

Not all six features are incontestable, of course, particularly given the case that instances of "second-person" narrative may yet be produced within narratives that do not unequivocally identify a single global narrator, as shown by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1975) and Daniel Gunn's Almost You (1994) (see Chapter 6). Yet Margolin's list of features does offer a practicable way of characterising the "second person" as generally distinct from the "first" and "third," and it succinctly provides, for those who require it, a means of provisionally establishing what Fludernik has called "the golden proportion between 'real' second-person texts and other fiction using the second-person pronoun in interesting and potentially significant ways" (Fludernik, 1994b: 284).

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