Reconsidering second-person narration and involvement

Abstract

The literature on second-person narration invariably mentions involvement as a special effect of you-narration on readers. This is arguably achieved because you-narration employs direct address and thus ‘communicates’ with real readers. I argue that one needs to take into consideration the second-person pronoun’s occurrence in, and its interplay with, a given discourse context. Using grammatical and narratological description, and drawing on a contemporary fictional example, this paper proposes that a distinction be made between affective-emotional involvement and aesthetic-reflexive involvement. It is hypothesized that it is the collocation of you with lexical items such as emotive verbs and with narrative techniques creating an interior perspective that creates a sense of experientiality and thus triggers emotional responses. Likewise, readers’ feeling of being addressed is shown to be attributable to the ‘interpersonal semiotic’ in various grammatical constructions, rather than to the usage of the second-person pronoun alone. The address function seems to be tied to the postmodern playfulness of you and readers’ aesthetic-reflexive involvement in this.