The General

On January 19, voters will caucus in Iowa. Unlike a primary, a caucus is a big time commitment. You can't just go into a booth and pull a lever, then go home to your warm television. Only a small percentage of Iowa voters participate in caucuses, giving no indication of what the larger pool will actually do come November. They drive through knee-high snow to meet in gymnasiums, pig farms, and fire stations. Within a half hour of the start time, people have to declare what candidate they are in favor of. The Republicans caucus with secret ballots. Democratic caucuses divide into groups and if your man gets less than 15 percent, you can go with another candidate or you can go home. Undecideds are wooed publicly, their fellows calling out to them in a process I call "mooing." Mooing sounds like this: "Hey Jay Bob, honey pie, come over to Gephardt country and get yourself some good loving." To caucus is to take two hours out of your day, at least, and travel to some forlorn destination in deep winter snow and still not have your vote counted.

--Stephen Elliott, Looking Forward to It

The second person does not always address the reader or listener directly. It can also be used in a generic way, as with directions: "To get to Harvard Square from Fenway Park via the T, you take the Green line to Park Street, then change to the Red line in the direction of Alewife."

The passage above uses second person sparingly to describe what happens during an electoral caucus for the people who participate in one. Elliott alternates between inserting "you" in the role of an Iowa voter and describing the events from afar, but the present tense throughout marks this as a generic description of a process fleshed out with imagined details. Some parts may not ring true for all people -- one might think, "I never get to go home to my TV after voting, I have to work on election day!" But the implied "If you were an Iowa voter, this is what you might do" places the entire scene in the hypothetical, and gets the author off the hook for any disparities between what he describes and what the reader's real experience may be.

Note that in the passage it is also implied that "you" are a Democrat, and to a lesser degree, backing a loser. Elliott's book is a personal chronicle of his months spent on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries for the 2004 US election. As he meets the candidates, their campaign staffs, and the journalists covering the whole circus, he fumbles, along with the rest of the Democratic party, to decide who the nominee for President should be. He assumes that anyone interested in his story probably shares some of his political views, and has some sympathy for his feelings of disenchantment and futility regarding the electoral process.

The Personal

There are easy ways to tell if you've been cursed with total recall. As a child, it probably started with music. You memorized the lyrics to every Beatles song and wrote them in the margins of your school notebooks. Classmates called on you to act out whole scenes from horror movies, or recall all the bit players in the Watergate burglary. Teachers gave you a few minutes to do a stand-up act at the end of every homeroom because otherwise there was no way to contain all the information you'd stuffed into your mind.

...

The only way to make a living with this memory was to teach people how to read and what to read. Your memory told you that the greatest strength was through writing about the past. Anybody could do it. You taught creative writing and literature, and with each word you read you remembered more about the particular styles your students were learning to develop. Was there a need to strictly follow lesson plans and drill into your students all those stale dramatic and poetic terms they'd have to recall for the mid-term? Of course not. There was no need to follow notes because you remembered it all.

--Christopher J. Stephens, "Our memory is there as blessing and curse" Metro, Boston edition 07 Feb 2005

This excerpt features the first and third paragraphs (out of five) from a short essay that appeared in a daily free newspaper. For more than half of the article, the use of second person is consistent. Does this make it more successful than the passage quoted above? In my opinion, it does not.

It begins innocently enough. It poses the hypothetical, "if you have total recall ..." and follows it with "probably." But then it continues with paragraph upon paragraph of statements about "you." Remembering song lyrics or movie quotes may be something most people can identify with, or at least imagine what it would be like to have a good memory for such details. But doing stand-up routines in class? This is beginning to move from the generic "you" of a role the reader can imagine himself in, to what feels like the specific experience of an individual. The past tense reinforces the impression that these are actual events, rather than possibilities.

The third paragraph carries this further. Teaching creative writing is "[t]he only way to make a living" for someone with total recall? That generalization doesn't feel intuitively true, and the author doesn't provide any support for it other than attributing more thoughts and motives to "you." It feels more and more like the "you" in this piece is the author in disguise, and that is likely to rankle with readers. Imposing thoughts and feelings on the second person, especially detailed and personal ones, runs a much greater risk of losing the reader than describing general actions.

After this paragraph the article switches to the first person, and the author confesses to being burdened not only with trivia but also bad memories that he cannot forget. This is a touching turn, but the article would have been stronger if it had dropped the second person pretense earlier, or if it had been limited to a second sentence that read "Maybe your childhood was similar to mine."

The Purely Fictional

If man has not become more bloodthirsty from civilization, at any rate he has certainly become bloodthirsty in a worse, a viler way than formerly. Formerly, he saw justice in bloodshed and with a quiet conscience exterminated whoever he had to; while now, though we do regard bloodshed as vile, we still occupy ourselves with this vileness, and even more than formerly. Which is worse? -- decide for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse this example from Roman history) liked to stick golden pins into her slave girls' breasts, and took pleasure in their screaming and writhing. You'll say that this was, relatively speaking, in barbarous times; that now, too, the times are barbarous because (again relatively speaking) now, too, pins get stuck in; that now, too, though man has learned to see more clearly on occasion than in barbarous times, he is still far from having grown accustomed to acting as reason and science dictate. But even so you are perfectly confident that he will not fail to grow accustomed once one or two old bad habits have passed and once common sense and science have thoroughly re-educated and given a normal direction to human nature. You are confident that man will then voluntarily cease making mistakes and, willy-nilly, so to speak, refuse to set his will at variance with his normal interests. Moreover: then, you say ...

--Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground

In fiction the second person sometimes appears when the author or narrator steps out of the story to address the reader; in other cases, it is used when the narrator is addressing another character directly (for example, in an epistolary novel that takes the form of letters from one character to another).

In Notes from Underground, it is unclear at first which of these approaches Dostoevsky is using. The narrator is never given a name, nor are the "gentlemen" he addresses throughout the first section of the book identified. Are they intended to represent the readers of the novella, or is there someone in particular the narrator is conversing with? Either way, the narrator adopts an aggressively hostile tone with his audience, putting words in their mouths and then refuting the arguments he presents on their behalf. Dostoevsky's narrator doesn't want his audience to be sympathetic to him; instead he pushes them away at every opportunity, running the risk that the people who buy the book will be alienated as well.

Under the relentless barrage of "you"s it is hard for the reader not to see himself in the role of the "gentlemen" the narrator is debating with. This is an uncomfortable position, because we are used to identifying with the narrator rather than being at odds with him, and also because the opinions that are pushed onto the "gentlemen" may not agree with the reader's own views. Furthermore, the narrator does not allow his opponents to be persuaded by his arguments, either. Page after page "you" are forced into the role of devil's advocate so as to allow the narrator to express his ideas, without being able to concede a point, strengthen an argument, or even agree with the narrator's premise.

Does Dostoevsky allow the reader to extricate himself from the conflict between the narrator and his audience? The narrator eventually admits,

To be sure, I myself have just made up all these words of yours.

And here's another puzzle for me: why indeed do I call you "gentlemen," why do I address you as if you were actually my readers? Such confessions as I intend to begin setting forth here are not published and given to others to read.

I, however, am writing only for myself, and I declare once and for all that even if I write as if I were addressing readers, that is merely a front, because it's easier for me to write that way. It's a form, just an empty form, and I shall never have any readers.

The statement that he will never have readers is not entirely true, even if he never publishes his notes or shares them with anyone. He will have himself, poring obsessively over his writing -- the "you" he is speaking to is really the narrator himself. The debate, in which the writer argues both sides, is a dramatization of the internal conflict within the Underground Man, and which he is unable or unwilling to resolve.

Conclusion

The second person, "you," allows a writer to manipulate the author-reader relationship. But when writing it is hard to anticipate your reader's reactions, so there are a few things to keep in mind when using the second person. Are you speaking to the reader directly? Are you asking him to imagine himself in a hypothetical situation? If you attribute actions or thoughts to the second person, can you really expect the reader to identify with them as if they were his own? What kind of assumptions are you making about the reader? If the "you" in the piece is a fictional character rather than the reader, are there signs that make this clear?

Finally, the appearance of the second person in a narrative can sometimes be distracting, and the more it is used, the more likely it is to strike a wrong note. But the effectiveness of second person techniques can often vary from reader to reader. I've given a few examples of the second person above with my impressions of whether they were successful or not; do you agree, or have other examples of good or bad use of second person?