Second-person narrative

When a narrator is narrating the story to another character through that character's point of view, that is called a second-person narrative.

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• "After turning off the alarm clock, you get out of your bed and head off to the bathroom to brush your teeth."

Second person is most commonly used in essays or instructions, and is rarely used in fictional stories. The pronoun "you" usually refers to the reader or a younger version of the narrator.

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When using the second person, the narrator will rarely narrate directly to the reader, as though the reader is a character in the story. The use of second person narration is rare outside of interactive fiction and the Choose Your Own Adventure series of novels, though it has been used in at least a few popular novels, most notably Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979), Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City (1985), Tom Robbins' Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), and in The Death of Artemio Cruz it occupied a third of the novel, with narrations in first and third persons being the other two thirds; all three of them telling the same story from different points in its timeline.

Related Topics:
Interactive fiction - Choose Your Own Adventure - Italo Calvino - If On a Winter's Night a Traveler - Jay McInerney - Bright Lights, Big City - Tom Robbins - Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

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