Post by mdnoyon on Jan 14, 2024 23:23:32 GMT -5
Have you ever read a novel or story written in the second person ? It's happened to me three times already and it was enough for me: the first in a literary forum and the second and third in stories in anthologies. When you read a collection of short stories, you never know how the stories will be written. Fortunately, novels and short stories written using the second person are rare. But they exist. And many also give advice on how to write them. Instead I will say why not write them . The reader as the protagonist of the story Some recommend writing in the second person to bring the reader into the story and thus create an "interactive literary experience".
I have managed to get into many of the stories I have read, perhaps most of them, written in the traditional way: in the first or third person. What is "interactive" about the second Phone Number List person is a mystery. Are we sure, then, that the reader should become the protagonist of the novel he is reading? No not at all. I don't want to be the protagonist, but to relax by reading the troubles and adventures that happen to the characters. This is the reader's task, otherwise he would be a writer or a fictional character. Or at least, if someone really wants to be the protagonist of a story, let them write an autobiography. Who is the second person addressing? To a man or a woman? I don't think it's possible to write an entire novel in the second person and at the same time in an impersonal way, without using either the masculine or the feminine.
In English it is possible, there are no gender variations, but in Italian there are. And in other languages too. Let's take a passage from the incipit of Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights , Big City: A little voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is already the result of too much dust. The night has now turned that imperceptible key with which you go from two to six in the morning. You know very well that the moment has come and gone, but you are still not willing to admit that you have exceeded the limit beyond which everything is a gratuitous side effect and paralysis of nerve endings.
I have managed to get into many of the stories I have read, perhaps most of them, written in the traditional way: in the first or third person. What is "interactive" about the second Phone Number List person is a mystery. Are we sure, then, that the reader should become the protagonist of the novel he is reading? No not at all. I don't want to be the protagonist, but to relax by reading the troubles and adventures that happen to the characters. This is the reader's task, otherwise he would be a writer or a fictional character. Or at least, if someone really wants to be the protagonist of a story, let them write an autobiography. Who is the second person addressing? To a man or a woman? I don't think it's possible to write an entire novel in the second person and at the same time in an impersonal way, without using either the masculine or the feminine.
In English it is possible, there are no gender variations, but in Italian there are. And in other languages too. Let's take a passage from the incipit of Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights , Big City: A little voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is already the result of too much dust. The night has now turned that imperceptible key with which you go from two to six in the morning. You know very well that the moment has come and gone, but you are still not willing to admit that you have exceeded the limit beyond which everything is a gratuitous side effect and paralysis of nerve endings.