I'm just not sure why a second-person is superior to a tightly-focalized third person narration, and can't help feeling that it's a piece of overt manipulation by an author.
Hrm.
A couple of years ago I wrote a piece in second person because it seemed to ask for it - I didn't ask myself a lot of questions about it at the time, but a beta reader said she wasn't comfortable with second person.
So I rewrote the entire piece in both first person and third person, and we went through all three. Once we were done, we agreed it needed to be in second person.
The two reasons became clear when we started to talk it through:
1) Distance. Others here have said it already, and for me it was important as well. In my story, Scully was chronically sleep-deprived, desperate and absolutely, thoroughly hopeless. She was acting not on her own sense of volition, but rather on a semi-internalized imperative. Must keep going. Must not sleep. Must protect the baby. It begged for the second person, because most of the piece was her simply living and breathing and following inferred commands to do these things. She had nearly no will of her own left because she had made herself so exhausted.
2) Gender issues. I didn't want to use any names, because at that point Scully was in a huge amount of emotional pain that she was avoiding by making herself numb. So no names. That left me in a personal-pronoun quandary. How could Scully be "she", Mulder be "he", and the baby be either "he" or "she" as well? Too confusing. The second person then left Mulder as "he" and the baby as "she". (Post-Requiem, natch.)
First person was too active a voice for this, and third person presumed too much. Second person implied her following a semi-internalized imperative just right. It wasn't a manipulation or gimmick at all -- it felt like the only effective way to tell the story.
In the end, I think the piece is strong because of it.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2003-02-19 07:04 am (UTC)Hrm.
A couple of years ago I wrote a piece in second person because it seemed to ask for it - I didn't ask myself a lot of questions about it at the time, but a beta reader said she wasn't comfortable with second person.
So I rewrote the entire piece in both first person and third person, and we went through all three. Once we were done, we agreed it needed to be in second person.
The two reasons became clear when we started to talk it through:
1) Distance. Others here have said it already, and for me it was important as well. In my story, Scully was chronically sleep-deprived, desperate and absolutely, thoroughly hopeless. She was acting not on her own sense of volition, but rather on a semi-internalized imperative. Must keep going. Must not sleep. Must protect the baby. It begged for the second person, because most of the piece was her simply living and breathing and following inferred commands to do these things. She had nearly no will of her own left because she had made herself so exhausted.
2) Gender issues. I didn't want to use any names, because at that point Scully was in a huge amount of emotional pain that she was avoiding by making herself numb. So no names. That left me in a personal-pronoun quandary. How could Scully be "she", Mulder be "he", and the baby be either "he" or "she" as well? Too confusing. The second person then left Mulder as "he" and the baby as "she". (Post-Requiem, natch.)
First person was too active a voice for this, and third person presumed too much. Second person implied her following a semi-internalized imperative just right. It wasn't a manipulation or gimmick at all -- it felt like the only effective way to tell the story.
In the end, I think the piece is strong because of it.