Write On! :: Comments :: The Treacherous Second Person

second person narrative is a tool, i think, that every writer needs to have in his bag but one which, like a pneumatic nailgun, must be wielded with extreme care.

i wrote a short story once in the second person. it weighed in at 500 words and i don't think i could have pushed it any further without it simply becoming a writing exercise.

there is however an important distinction to be made between addressing the reader as a passive participant versus as an active participant.

in the first case the author is, to use a tired expression, breaking the fourth wall to acknowledge the readers. this can be a powerful device and many writers have used it to great effect. the advantage of this method is that the reader will automatically identify to a certain extent with the hypothetical reader named "you": they are, after all, both reading the book. this is the way that dostoyevsky is using the second person.

when the author addresses the reader as an active participant however, he takes a much bigger risk. it quickly becomes a difficult endeavour to remain engaged by a story which constantly tells you what you are doing or what you have done, especially if such actions are out of character. and, except in choose-your-own-adventures (an influential genre which you forgot to mention), the author is basically just pulling the readers along for the ride with many many opportunities to lose them. this has been done in literature on far fewer occasions. one example which springs to mind is Tom Robbin's novel: "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas".

In "Frog Pajamas" Robbins uses the second person as active participant consistently for nearly three hundred pages. furthermore he consciously creates a protagonist that very few of his readers will identify with. The novel is readable and the tense becomes slightly transparent after time, but the book still stumbles from time to time over the inevitable second person roadblocks. i wouldn't really recommend it as a good read, but i strongly recommend it as a research tool to any other writer thinking of trying the same thing.

That is a good distinction to make -- how much work, in a sense, is the writer asking of the second person character? And is it implied that the reader is the "you" in question, or is "you" an off-stage persona?

I might disagree that Dostoevsky's "you" is passive, here. It's not quite the cookie-cutter 19th-century "Dear reader, can you imagine what I saw next? Well, I will tell you ...." Though Dostoevsky doesn't attach any actions to the second person as such, I feel he still places a burden on his audience, by imposing certain thoughts and opinions on "you," and creating an antagonistic relationship.

It's been a long time since I last read a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure; lately I'm more used to other kinds of text-based roleplaying worlds (bless the Internet). In those cases it's just as challenging to try and anticipate the range of possible responses to a scenario so that a character can navigate the world as as that character would, rather than simply carrying out the tasks the game would have them do. Similarly, it's sometimes hard to avoid the temptation to impose certain responses, particularly emotional ones, on a character once you get going in the second person: "You are frightened to discover a ferocious tiger prowling in a rusty iron cage." Is the reader/character really scared of tigers? Would they be surprised to find it here or have they seen it before? Or do you let readers draw their own conclusions: "A tiger bares its teeth and emits a low growl as it tests the weak latch of its cage." -- and react accordingly?

--ich sage nicht, was ich will, sondern was die Sprache will--
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