What is second person narration. I know I should know this?

Answer 1

second persond is speking directly to the character. so instead of saying i did such and such, it would say you did such and such

Answer 2

When the narrator speaks to the main character in the story.
"You went to the store, bought some milk..." The only book written in this technique, that I can think of is Big Lights, Big City by I can't remember who.

Answer 3

Second-person narration is a narrative technique in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, e.g. the English second-person pronoun "you ".



"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder" (The opening lines of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1985)).

Traditionally, the employment of the second-person form in literary fiction has not been as prevalent as the corresponding first-person and third-person forms, yet second-person narration is, in many languages, a very common technique of several popular and non- or quasi-fictional written genres such as guide books, self-help books, D.I.Y-manuals, interactive fiction, role-playing games, Choose Your Own Adventure series of novels, pop song lyrics, advertisements, etc.


Although not the most common narrative technique in literary fiction, second-person narration has, however, constituted a favoured form of various literary works within, notably, the modern and post-modern tradition. In addition to a not insignificant number of consistent (or nearly consistent) second-person novels and short-stories by, for example, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Carlos Fuentes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Georges Perec, Jay McInerney, etc., the technique of narrative second-person address has been widely employed in shorter or longer intermittent chapters or passages of narratives by William Faulkner, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, Nuruddin Farah, Jan Kjærstad and many others.

whereas first- and third-person narrations (as well as Genette's categories of homo- and heterodiegesis) are defined along the axis of narrator, second-person narration is defined along the axis of narratee--more precisely, by the coincidence of narratee and protagonist. However, second-person narration deserves its own place in typologies of narration because of its particular rhetorical effects. This problem of categorization is actually a problem with reigning models of narration, which are based solely on the status of voice. (1) Second-person narration, which is defined not by who is speaking but by who is listening (the narratee), does not adequately fit into a model of narration that centers on voice or narrator. In the present essay, I use an analysis of second-person narration to expose the inadequacy of voice-based models of narration, and then I propose a new model that utilizes multiple variables of narrative transmission--namely, the relationships formed by the triad of narrator, protagonist, and narratee. Not only does this new model account for second-person narration, it also enhances our understanding of texts currently defined as first- and third-person (as well as homo- and heterodiegetic).

Answer 4

second person is referring to "you", meaning the reader. Not many books are written in second person for obvious reasons but Chuck Palahniuk uses it at times in books such as Fight Club