In a series of craft notes, we’re illustrating Point of View. If you want to see the first step in this process, click here to see Alice Munro’s version, in First Person Informant: First POV Post.
I’m going to use an example that casts all the points of view that I know of, since seeing the real thing is mostly better than just verbiage about the real thing. Over the next few posts I’ll use a Munro story to lay out (my version) of the opening scenes of a short story to illustrate POV. If you’re sufficiently interested you might want to collect the segments into a single document.
Second person has two forms, the “I” substitute and the reader as character. Second person, difficult to sustain in longer works, gives the reader the largely false impression that the reader is in the book and is a participant – in spite of the fact that the reader has no free will. Second person can work well with present tense (You ride the horse), can be manipulated to handle past tense (You rode the horse), and often seems clumsy in past perfect (You would have ridden the horse).
Here is Second Person “I” Substitute in present tense:
After supper your father says, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” You both leave your mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for you against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make you stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. You leave your brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda, and sometimes, he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” but you call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn your head.
got it