What is this mysterious ‘second person’ point of view?

Right, you’ve been in a few classes – the usual thing you find when going through a quick review of “person” is to skip quickly over second person – a brief thought that it’s experimental and move onto more useful first and third person narrative voices.

You get a bit extra at this recent one though and maybe there’s more than met your eye.

What you got was along the lines that second person is getting more popular now, particularly in YA and some other intimate love narratives. But you’re still not encouraged to use it.  Quite right too. It draws attention to itself and dominates what you’re hoping to convey.

Hang on though, you think. that’s not real second person that’s more like…. or put it another way, might there be more to this second person than you first though. Is there a real one and are there the fakes?

Levels of narrative presence

You’d want to work out which level this mystery you sits at. What if you had a quick grid of narrative presence and reception to help plot the problem:

 

Writer/Author The real, actual person, alive or dead. The one Barthes murdered. The one Eliot characterised as the man (sic) that suffers and the mind that creates. The subject of unfashionable biographical criticism and the body that fills the top seat at book launches. All sorts of fallacies here around who means what and how affective they are.

Putative/

assumed author

Possibly more wise and experienced than the real bodily writer; may become more visible in noms-de-plume. Who is supposed to be writing, what do they look like and where do they sit, when were they doing their writing?

Endless possibilities for creative games around who a real person can pretend to be or who their readers believe they are – watched Misery last night btw.
Assumed narrator

A step deeper into the fiction. In a third person this is likely to feel like the putative author – but that same putative author may have other books and that’s not the same assumed narrator.

An assumed narrator will still have characteristics betrayed in tone, in stylistic and structural choices and they will exhibit a point of view. They are a shadow character, often not revealing themselves in any tangible sense.
Narrator

When the assumed narrator takes more of a step into the limelight.

Easily spotted in first person. It’s the one who uses I.

Can there be an assumed narrator and a narrator?

Check out Oswald Bastable in The Woodbegoods. “It’s one of us who tells this story but I won’t tell you which one of us it is…” the Oswald character is then described in such glowing terms we’re in no doubt. It’s still a third person narrative, but there’s a character narrator. Where does the fictional Oswald sit in Nesbitt’s device?

Or in stories where the narrator is dead or unborn or unlikely for one reason and another to write in the style that is there on the page… we have a character telling a story and something/someone else between the inventive mind of the writer and their character.

A framed narrative like Wuthering Heights encourages a whole Russian doll of more or less trustworthy narrators.
Protagonist character Will you be the hero of your own story? (Cf Copperfield) This is the next level for me because it’s likely to be the I narrator of the first person. Or, it’s likely to be the most lovingly inhabited by a third person narrator. They have voice and presence and they – in a dance with the narrator – help nuance the point of view.
(Assumed) addressee

One more to get a collection together and see where our second person point of view is coming from.

There is a set of levels of reception for our levels of narrator. Who are they talking to?

Sometimes there’s a characterised sense of who might receive the words.  Epistolary novels give a recipient character directly. Gulliver’s Travels plays with the kind of reader who might read the extravagant travelog.* The diary form suggests an interloper reading something only meant for a self – and what self? a future self or an imagined self.

 

So where does the second person point of view sit?

Are any of these a second person point of view?

  1. Whenever you go into the dark barn you see two green lights in the distance, like eyes.
  2. You’re standing in a queue, right, like you do. You see the clock and it’s practically stopped in front of your eyes.
  3. Thou, Thou art being and breath and what thou art can never be destroyed.
  4. Ye are the salt of the earth and sainted.
  5. Yous lot are gonna win the game and the pride yous’ll feel’ll live with yous forever
  6. You spoke to him, you said you loved him, and then you picked up the gun.
  7. Go downstairs. Pick up the knife. Find that bastard and slit his throat.
  8. You did it again, useless! Why should she want to go out with you?
  9. Chris, mate, you’ve got to sort yourself out. What have you got the knife for anyway?

Some of these – some more clearly than others – are a voice to an addressee. So whose point of view?

If we try to find the second person on the narrative persona table above then it seems to offer a strongly voiced assumed narrator and a character that shares attributes of third person narratives. Saying ‘you went downstairs’ rather than ‘Greg went downstairs’ doesn’t give us anything richer in Greg’s point of view – its effect (beyond the unfamiliarity) is a slightly more aggressive assumed narrator.

My problem with second person as an idea or alternative is it’s not a point of view. It immediately feels more like a recipient or an assumed addressee.

Most of the examples above are forms of apostrophe – the addressing of someone or thing as though it were present and human. It feels very much exclusive to the dead poets’ realm to address the elements – you arrogant beast – but is that any different from the practice of addressing a novel character?

Does tense make any difference? Does the past of 6 feel different in terms of person POV from the future of 5? Does the imperative of of 7 give any different life for the character? Does a name make a difference?

In all of the above the assumed narrator is stronger for me than the addressee. Number 6 reads like a wistful diary entry and the narrator’s style and heartache are more in view and at stake than what the ‘you’ is doing.

The narrative you could easily be couched as a long quote without the quotation marks, literally an address. Or an epistolary ‘letter to..’ format. But the you would have to be the primary character/protgagonist to get anywhere close to a second person. Willie Russell’s The Wrong Boy is narrated in letters to Morrissey and does enter into the ‘you’ address regularly – the you isn’t a character though, it’s an apostrophied ear, a confession not a million miles from the address of The Color Purple.

Perhaps ‘second person’ depends on how prominently the protagonist character holds sway over the narrator?

Two of these are out of context of course. Number 5 is from the end of an Emily Bronte poem that does begin with a first person narrator who – presumably – speaks the words in that shadowy putative author/assumed narrator slide that poetry of that kind encourages (added putative author interest also from sister Charlotte’s appending false notes about it being Emily’s last ever lines). On its own though, it shows an interesting kind of second person effect. Number 4 is a quote from a sermon, Matthew 5:13, literally an address by the character conjured through the witness of Matthew and – for the religious – a complex sense of (putative) author. Ditto Donne:

Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains call on us? John Donne, ‘The Sun Rising.’

The ‘us’ awakens us much more to the idea of a speaker idly making address rather than nudging a character into action and establishing an alternative point view. But the way these examples slide from the poetic apostrophe, are addressed but do not act, says something about what we’d be looking for in a true second person point of view.

Those ‘second person narratives’ that are becoming increasingly popular in certain genres seem to be type 6 – and have the effect of slightly lovelorn obsession from the assumed narrator. For me there is more force and less ikkiness (as I said, watched Misery) in a third person narrative with a strong assumed narrator. In some circumstances that hefty ‘You’ can feel like an assumed narrator arguing with their alter ego – example 8 – and the effect is quite disconcerting. Should you use it to hint at forms of fractured selves then – maybe – have a go.

For me only 7 is getting close to a genuine second person. The character is deeply embedded at the level of primary character. The you being addressed does react to what is being stated and there is a close sense of point of view – we may well feel some of the pain of the demands being made upon them.

In reality though there is something missing.

A piece isn’t second person just because you use the word you.

 

 

* Gulliver’s Travels is framed by a publisher character addressing readers on his decision to publish. “There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it.”