We’re going to get a little technical here. Linguistically.
In standard English, the pronoun “you” can address the person you’re speaking to, it can address a crowd of people, and it can even refer to a hypothetical person, using the general-you, or “one”. Likewise, second-person narration isn’t necessarily making the story about you, the real life reader.
This is where many people are giving up on books that have second-person narration, because they start reading and then they are pulled out of the story when they feel they’ve been ‘mischaracterized’. This is of course not counting stories like Choose Your Own Adventure novels and reader insert fanfiction, where the real reader may actually be meant to serve as an actant in the story. But having reading experience in those narratives and then picking up a book with a “you” narrator who is not actually you can be jarring.
In the end, someone may not read books with second-person narration because of personal taste, just like with any other POV. Plenty of people won’t pick up stories with first-person narration when paired with present tense, or maybe they recoil at head-hoppy third-person omniscience. Second-person narration is a real risk for an author to employ. It certainly isn’t perfect. But it is misunderstood.
Who Is “You”?
Matt DelConte—whose work focuses on narrative theory—offers this definition of second person narration:
“Second-person narration is a narrative mode in which a narrator tells a story to a (sometimes undefined, shifting, and/or hypothetical) narratee —delineated by you— who is also the (sometimes undefined, shifting, and/or hypothetical) principal actant in that story.”
And Oxford Reference defines the narratee as:
“The imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a given narrative. The narratee is a notional figure within the ‘space’ of the text itself, and is thus not to be confused either with the real reader or with the implied reader (who is addressed by the implied author at a separate ‘level’).”
I’ll illustrate this with a video game called Disco Elysium.
The RPG starts after you pick your stats. It opens to a completely black screen and some dialogue from an unseen speaker simply called “Ancient Reptilian Brain”.
I’m using Disco Elysium specifically because of this black screen. At this point, you have not been introduced to the principal actant in the story. Narrative distance between the story and the reader/player is vague. Aside from the dialogue and action choices, it is essentially no different from reading a book.
But then our perception of the protagonist sharpens.
We are visually introduced to him after some back-and-forth with different levels of his psyche against a black screen. If this was a book, this is where some readers are giving up on it, thinking to themselves, “Hey, I’m not a middle aged alcoholic cop guy! I wouldn’t do these things. This doesn’t align with my experience.” And that is a major drawback of writing in second-person narration. It’s a bit of a push and pull between the narrative and the reader, susceptible to slingshotting them in either direction if not done right.
The video game benefits because of the medium, keeping the reader’s/player’s involvement through branching dialogue and clicks of the mouse. Aside from Choose Your Own Adventure novels, books don’t have that benefit. They must manage the psychic distance purely through the craft of putting words on a page.
Thus far, I’ve talked about a couple of different narratees: the real reader and the principal actant, like in Disco Elysium where the protagonist is Harrier du Bois. We can visualize this in another way, using some illustrations from Dennis Schofield’s Beyond ‘The Brain of Katherine Mansfield’: The Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative:
Here, the second-person narration is addressing you, the real or implied reader, who occupies the world outside of the text. Examples would include Choose Your Own Adventure novels and reader insert fanfiction, as mentioned before.
This figure shows the narratee as a character within the text, like Harrier Du Bois in Disco Elysium in my example.
You can think of this one as a character telling the story to themself, where the principal actant is both the narrator and the narratee.
Remember at the start of this post when I mentioned the generic-you? This figure illustrates the narrator addressing no one specific, but a general you, one, we, or it.
Effect
Compared to other POVs, writing in the second-person is a very deliberate choice. It has to be. It’s tough to get right, and there’s a high risk that it won’t resonate. More than a lot of literary devices out there, this one is quite the tough sell for casual readers, who may make their decision to invest in the story—or not—no later than the very first sentence. So why write in the second-person at all?
The three main points are tone, theme, and psychic distance.
Tone
If you’re like me and you read a lot of short fiction, you may not be as much of a stranger to second-person narration as those who mainly read long form prose. If so, you may have noticed that second-person narratives seem to have a common, melancholic tone. This isn’t an accident, according to Alberto Castelli in his article “The Melancholy of the Second-Person Narrator”. A professor of Literature, Castelli suggests that this is a feature of the literary technique. ‘You’ evokes intimacy, a close conversation with someone who is pointing out all of the intricacies of a human spirit caught in a cycle of frustration, unfulfillment, and questions of identity. It reads as poetic. Castelli says of Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, “…the second-person point of view cuts directly to a more profound and universal dimension switching the reader’s role from observer to participant.” The very notion of ‘this could be you’ causes that possibility to be in the back of the reader’s mind throughout the story. This suffering, this confusion, this sadness, it could all be you.
Theme
Identity is going to come into play again here, and so is the intimacy of this point of view. If a second-person narrative doesn’t explore the themes that the ‘you’ pronoun would enhance, then why bother taking the risk with this literary technique at all? The story may end up falling flat or invoking a strange feeling of disconnect. Or, if used right, then the second-person point of view could weave effortlessly into the content of the text itself, enhancing it rather than muddying it.
An example would be Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy. A woman deals with the death of her mother (the woman being the protagonist, the narratee referred to as ‘you’) and wrestles that grief while she translates the journal of a group of girls (a blur of characters only ever referred to as ‘we’ in their perspective) who are training to be doctors in the middle of a civil war. The girls dare themselves to practice something called radical compassion, promising to always feel for their patients, even when it gets hard. As the girls try to have compassion for others, the grieving woman tries to have compassion for herself. The ‘you’ narrative in the grieving woman’s perspective may even be inviting readers to have compassion for themselves. The choices in point of view and the themes that are conveyed are inseparable, and one can be used to analyze and explain the other.
Psychic Distance
Done right, second-person narration can grab the reader by the front of their shirt and pull them in impossibly close. It can get in your mind. It can heighten empathy, engagement, and investment in the story. Even if you know, logically, that the story isn’t about you, the reader, every instance of the word demands your attention, making you feel like:
This might be related to studies that have found the use of the generic-you has a noticeable positive influence on the level of persuasiveness and resonance in interactions. People want to be seen. Addressed. Spoken to. They want that human connection.
However, second-person narration can also create distance rather than pull a reader in close to the character’s thoughts and feelings. It depends on the story, especially if the story is exploring detachment from the self.
What Would I Look for as an Editor?
Writing second-person narration is a deliberate choice, just like with any other POV, so I’ll be on the lookout to see what the author’s intention is with that choice versus what the execution is in reality. However, it calls attention to itself more so than other POVs, so it really needs to have a strong purpose. Does it elevate the theme like in Meet Us by the Roaring Sea? Does its universality make the story’s lens more striking, like in ‘How to Be an Other Woman’? Is the tone it sets right for this particular story? Does it give the reader a sense of involvement, or does it have the opposite effect? Is the character dealing with interior conflicts that are enhanced by the second-person narrative like a crisis of identity?
Plus I ask the same questions I ask myself of other POVs when editing, like: Can any other POV be a better suited angle? Is it appropriate for the genre? Is there head-hopping? Does it handle secrets well and create tension within its structure?
To boil it down completely, I ask Is this working? and then based on what my answer is, I ask myself How? and compile the evidence. The first two steps of editing in a nutshell.
For Further Study
I list my references below, but if you want a really good look into second-person narration, I suggest watching Shaelin Bishop’s video Writing in 2nd Person | The Forgotten POV.
Reading List
Looking to take some stories with a second-person narrator for a drive? Try these:
Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy (novel)
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (novel)
How to be an Other Woman by Lorrie Moore (short story)
Gator Butchering for Beginners by Kristen Arnett (short story)
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (novel)(not the first in the series, so you might not want to start here)
Disco Elysium (video game)
References
Castelli, Alberto. “The Melancholy of the Second-Person Narrator.” _Confluencia_ 38, no. 2 (2023): 41–59. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27219274.
DelConte, Matt. “Why _You_ Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and a New Model for Understanding Narrative.” _Style_ 37, no. 2 (2003): 204–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.37.2.204.
Schofield, Dennis. “Beyond ‘The Brain of Katherine Mansfield’: The Radical Potentials and Recuperations of Second-Person Narrative.” _Style_ 31, no. 1 (1997): 96–117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946365.
The persuasive role of generic-you in online interactions. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-83440-1
“You” speaks to me: Effects of generic-you in creating resonance between people and ideas: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010939117
