“After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events. On the stereo you play your favorite harp and oboe music.”
“Your day breaks, your mind aches / You find that all the words of kindness linger on / When she no longer needs you”
“It is an incontestable fact that you are no longer young. One month from today, you will be turning sixty-four, and although that is not excessively old, not what anyone would consider to be an advanced old age, you cannot stop yourself from thinking about all the others who never managed to get as far as you have.”
“You’ve been wondering why your boss isn’t paying attention to you, and you’ve probably noticed your colleague, Sonia Grissom, putting in unusually long hours recently. She’s being a little bit distant towards you, too.”
“Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass.”
“I am tying the pages together so you cannot …”
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You’ve probably noticed that all the passages above* are about you. Written in the second person (as this blog post is), they’re addressed to you — the reader or listener. It’s a rare form of writing in literary fiction: most novels are written in the third person, in which the protagonists are referred to by the pronouns “he”, “she” or “they” (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” —James Joyce, Ulysses), or in the first person, told from the point of view of the narrator (“Atticus had promised me he would wear me out if he ever heard of me fighting any more; I was far too old and too big for such childish things, and the sooner I learned to hold in, the better off everybody would be.” — Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird).
The “narrative you” has the effect of drawing the reader actively, intimately and some would argue empathically into the narrative’s world; it forces the reader unapologetically to be the main protagonist of the text. And so we see it in guide books, self-help books and do-it-yourself manuals, song lyrics, ads and blogs. The Lennon-McCartney song “For No One” is a lovely example of lyrics in the second person**, which tend to make every listener feel as though the song was written especially for them. A few movie screenplays employ second-person voice-over narrations for deliberate effect: Lars von Trier’s Europa from 1991 imitates the voice of a hypnotist (“On the count of ten, you will be in Europa”), and in the classic 1945 movie Brief Encounter, it’s Laura’s confession of her infidelity to her husband, whom she refers to as “you” throughout, that provides the film’s narration. On his popular US radio show A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor always narrates his “Beebop-a-Reebop Rhubarb Pie” tales in the second person, after which he asks: “Wouldn’t this be a great time for a piece of rhubarb pie? Yes, nothing gets the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth quite like Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie.” And that’s partly why ads work, because they’re talking to YOU, and not to anyone else …
In literature, second-person narration is rare, especially as a form used consistently throughout a book. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) is a famous modern example, and Michiko Kakutani, in her review of that novel in the New York Times, helped to illustrate why the narrative technique has been employed or enjoyed so little over the centuries, arguing that “the reader quickly becomes irritated with Mr. McInerney’s attempt to tell the entire story in second person — all the ”you’s” pile up into a jangled heap of grammatical contortions.” However, you can read plenty of examples of novels and short stories in the second person, written by Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other modern and post-modern writers. You will often read chapters or passages of second-person narratives by authors such as William Faulkner, Iain Banks and Günter Grass.
Nearly three decades after Bright Lights, Big City was published, when Mohsin Hamid wrote his own book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, McInerney expressed surprise that “some other maniac had attempted to write a novel in the second person singular.” As the New York Daily News reported when the two authors met up to discuss this narrative form (among other things — like freedom of speech and “Homeland”), Hamid said: “I really like the second person, because it’s a register we don’t use that often in writing — but we use it in speech all the time. … What’s particularly exciting about it is that it can be either very close and very near, or you can zoom back to a cosmic, almost religious text: ‘thou shalt not…’, and so there’s a wonderful ability to move in the second person.” As the article goes on: “This sort of “movement” gels well with Hamid’s habit of manipulating readers’ perspectives and generating a sense of empathy. At one point, Hamid cited McInerney’s work as an influence in this regard: ‘Oftentimes, you can read the second person as an invitation, which I think in ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ it was.'”
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* The passages are excerpts from the following novels or songs: Lorrie Moore: Self-Help; The Beatles: “For No One”; Paul Auster: Winter Journal; Charles Stross: Halting State; George Perec: Things; The Monster at the End of This Book (a Sesame Street book)
** Another Beatles song written in the second person is “Hey Jude”, and there might be more.