Second-person narrative is a rare but engaging technique in which the narrator uses “you” instead of “I” or “he/she/they.” It is often used in modern and postmodern literature, and can draw attention to the story. Examples include Choose Your Own Adventure books and works by William Faulkner, Margaret Atwood, and Jay McInerney.
A second person narrative is a story written in the second person. That is, the narrator is described with the second-person pronoun “you” rather than the more common “I” of first-person narratives or “he/she/they” of third-person writing. This has the effect of engaging the reader, partly because the writer seems to be addressing the reader directly, and partly because second-person narrative is so unusual. Though rare, second-person narratives have been employed by several prestigious writers, mainly in modern and postmodern literature.
First-person narrative, in which an author appears to be describing events they personally witnessed, has been used in literature for centuries. Prominent examples include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The third person is by far the most common narrative voice for both fiction and non-fiction, allowing an author to describe any aspect of the story, even those events that would be hidden from an actual participant. This technique is sometimes called the omniscient or objective point of view. Readers find these formats so familiar that they usually accept them without hesitation when starting a story.
Second-person narration, by contrast, warns the reader that something unusual is going on. This is one reason why he is often looked down upon; many writers prefer to avoid techniques that call attention to themselves, as they can be seen as drawing attention away from the story. In sustained narratives such as novels and short stories, however, the reader will quickly get used to the style and proceed as if it were a first-person narrative. In most cases, readers are not invited to consider themselves actually participants in the story, although there are some exceptions.
In the children’s book series Choose Your Own Adventure published in the 1980s and 1990s, young readers were invited to direct the plot of the story. They did this by choosing what actions to take at crucial points and then reading the chapters that matched the results. The popular series pioneered the interactive fiction genre, which has since appeared in computer games, DVDs, and the Internet. Magical realist author Italo Calvino took a different approach in his experimental novel If on a winter’s night a traveler. The odd-numbered chapters describe the reader’s attempts to read various novels, which are presented in the even-numbered chapters of the book.
Second-person narrative has been employed by other inventive authors of the modern era, including William Faulkner, Thomas Pynchon, and Margaret Atwood. Perhaps the most famous example is Jay McInerney’s bestseller Bright Lights, Big City, which explores the adventures of an unnamed character in the New York City club scene. Tom Robbins playfully employed second-person narrative in his 1994 novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. In his short story “Just Another Perfect Day,” science fiction author John Varley uses this technique to describe the effects of an alien invasion. The story unfolds as a long letter to the protagonist, who has catastrophic memory loss and cannot remember the invasion.
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