Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 July 22

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July 22

Second person narratives

Since I study in a bilingual environment, disagreement has arisen between my English and Chinese teachers on the subject of whether narratives can be written from a second person perspective. Is there any existing debate on this issue, or is there a definitive answer? The Average Wikipedian (talk) 04:48, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

I don't know about the debate, but our article/subsection Narration#Second-person does mention Bright Lights, Big City (where, it has to be pointed out, the second person narrator is addressing himself as "you") as well as poems and tons of songs of course (random example: "Every Breath You Take"). ---Sluzzelin talk 05:59, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Every Breath You Take has lines like "..I'll be watching you", so it's mixed 1st and 2nd, at best. StuRat (talk) 22:31, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Paul Auster in Winter Journal uses the same technique of addressing himself in second person [1]. No such user (talk) 07:38, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

Edna O'Brien's A Pagan Place and much of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler are written in the second person. A new novelist called Angelina Mirabella has explained "Why I Wrote a Novel in Second Person". --Antiquary (talk) 09:45, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

French Wikipedia's article récit à la deuxième personne has some more examples such as Hawthorne's short story "The Haunted Mind". That article writes that Henri Bachelin's novel Le Serviteur (1918, winner of the Prix Femina) was the first narrative entirely written in the second-person point of view. ---Sluzzelin talk 09:58, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Sluzzelin and Antiquary for your replies. Interestingly enough, it was the English teacher who said that it is technically impossible to write in the second person. The Average Wikipedian (talk) 15:07, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

You might also consider the genre of Gamebooks, such as "Choose your own adventure", a sort of role-playing game in book form, in which the narrative is often in the second person. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195}

94.12.80.244 (talk) 16:02, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Monique Wittig, a French novelist, played with language and stretched it, using a non-gendered pronoun (on, which is freighted with other connotations, and can best be thought of as third person[2]). At least two of her works, L'Opoponax and Les Guérillères, were translated into English using the second person[3]; I believe but am not certain that these translations were by Helen Weaver and David Le Vay, respectively. This claims that an unrelated English-language novel entitled Despair uses second-person narration too. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 18:00, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

My copy of Les Guérillères ISBN 2-7073-0042-X places greater emphasis on the pronoun "Elles" (3rd person plural feminine) than on "On" (impersonal 3rd person, also 1st person plural in speech), as far as I can see by flipping through it. In the English translation by David Le Vay that I have (published by Avon/Bard books in 1973), "Elles" is usually translated by "The women" at the beginning of a paragraph, and by "they" elsewhere. Neither the English nor the French version is a second-person narrative in any conventional sense, as far as I can see. If Wittig plays around linguistically with quasi-pronominals, it's by frequently invoking feminine plural forms which exist in French, but are infrequently used (such as "quelques-unes"), as far as I can tell at my level of French comprehension (by no means equivalent to that of a native speaker). AnonMoos (talk) 22:27, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

Donald Barthelme's short story "Träumerei" is another example. Deor (talk) 22:39, 22 July 2017 (UTC)

@Carbon Caryatid: From my understanding of French "on" is grammatically third person and first person plural in meaning, so it should be seen as a first person perspective albeit plural which is kind of special ("on" and "nous" being similar but I think "on" can be used to generalise a group of people whereas "nous" is more specific, might have mixed it up though). @Deor: Thanks I'll check it out. @IP: That's what my Chinese teacher suggested, books where you select the ending are often written in second person. The Average Wikipedian (talk) 02:16, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

The links I provided above are to literary criticism of Wittig, not copies of the books in question. English language litcrit of French pronoun choices: one coinage describes on as "monomorphous diversity".

Blog lists of novels making extensive use of the second person are Atwood to Tolstoy, The Power of You, and Good Readds Second Person. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 14:21, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

I know nothing about Opoponax, but from what I can see from perusing the English and French versions of Les Guérillères (without having read either one completely from cover to cover), it's not a 2nd-person narrative, and on is less prominent than elles... AnonMoos (talk) 23:20, 26 July 2017 (UTC)