Talk:Second-person narrative

Latest comment: 7 years ago by Srteks in topic Hawthorne

What does this mean?? edit

Somebody has inserted this line of text (see below) to the begining of the entry. What does it mean. Please be more specific. I do not understand a word of it!

NEVER COPY THIS EXACT FORMAT! IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT, CHANGE MOST OR ALL OF THE WORDS. DIFFERENT ORDER WORKS, SO DOES THIS!

The only thing I have been doing is to alter the order of the list of second-person narratives because it was not entirely alphabetical. If there is anything that you want to discuss, please discuss it here and not in the main article! Jeppebarnwell 11:57, 22 November 2006 (UTC)Reply

I removed the following sentence: One of the few well-known songs to be told in second-person is "Year of the Cat" from the album of the same name by Al Stewart. The statement is obviusly inacurate. There are thousands of songs in the second-person!

Camus' The Fall removed from the list. Despite a lot of Second-person adressing, this novel is not a piece of second-person narration, according to the defintion given in this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.72.52.245 (talk) 19:32, 27 September 2007 (UTC)Reply

Removed Song of Stone by Iain banks as although there is some second-person addressing, it's written in the first person. His Complicity does have several significant second-person sections so I've added that one. (Also added Stross's Halting State and tidied up the list into alphabetical order. Immortalhandoreye —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 11:44, 9 October 2007 (UTC)Reply

Regier edit

I'm a hockey fan. I love the Regier anecdote. But I can't find anything even resembling a citation for this, so it doesn't belong.

Buffalo Sabres general manager Darcy Regier is famous for his clever and consistent oral use of the second person narrative in interviews and press conferences. He is one of very few people who is known to publicly use the second person narrative orally. [citation needed]

I'd love to see it returned to the article page with any semblance of a citation. MaxEnt (talk) 02:00, 8 March 2008 (UTC)Reply


I agree, and also, the claim that Regier is "one of very few people who is known to publicly use the second person narrative orally" is probably inaccurate. The use of second person narrative orally is probably rather common, which make anecdote somewhat redundant in this entry. However, it might be more relevant to the entry on Darcy Regier? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.212.114.26 (talk) 09:55, 8 March 2008 (UTC)Reply

Role-Playing edit

I added role-playing games to related articles, since taking the role of a single person in a story is ultimately a second-person narrative, but the storyteller (game-master) always addresses the players in second person (naturally). I know that most RPG stories are not really a beautiful work of art (not art at all in my opinion), but they are still stories, and the purpose of RPG is telling/making a story. --85.220.3.229 (talk) 11:26, 22 April 2008 (UTC)Reply


Don't forget MUDs! DEMONIIIK (talk) 07:35, 9 May 2008 (UTC)Reply


Second Person Games edit

change list to table? edit

wouldn't it be a good idea to reformat the list of narratives into a wikitable, so that people could sort it according to different criteria - for instance, chronologically instead of alphabetically? i just had that need myself, and thought it might be useful to others as well... --Anderssl (talk) 07:47, 6 September 2010 (UTC)Reply

Other second-person narratives (spoilers)! edit

Two more works written almost entirely in second person: Charles Stross's Rule 34 and Andrew Hussie's Homestuck. In both cases, the viewpoint character changes repeatedly through the narrative; and in both cases there is an in-story reason for the second-person perspective. In Rule 34, the ending reveals that the events of the story have been orchestrated by an AI that lacks its own personal perspective and so projects its identity onto humans. Homestuck is modeled on text adventure games (which use the second person to involve the player) and places some characters in the role of observing (and suggesting) other characters' actions through computer terminals similarly to how a game player views and controls characters in a game. —FOo (talk) 01:57, 22 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

Hawthorne edit

I note that in a list of modern and post-modern authors who have used the second-person form, the name Nathaniel Hawthorne pops up. Might this be an error for Nathaniel West? If Nathaniel Hawthorne really did use second-person, that would be remarkable, and worthy of a paragraph on its own, seems to me. Abenr (talk) 18:30, 18 November 2013 (UTC)Reply

Nathaniel Hawthorn's "The Haunted Mind" has been described by Monika Fludernik as the first real example of a second-person narrative text. Srteks (talk) 01:27, 30 September 2016 (UTC)Reply