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
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 reader participation, where the author asks you to become the little girl:
Imagine that after supper your father says, “Want to go down and see if the lake's still there?” You'd probably laugh at this, knowing he's not serious and it's only a signal that he wants to get out of the house, and he chooses you for this venture. Let's say you leave your mother – perhaps she is sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for you against the opening of school. Maybe the clothes begin from some other garment rendered down – she has ripped up an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly. It's likely that she also make you stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool. Let us further decide that you are ungrateful, in spite of all the effort she is showering on you. Then we complicate it more, as you leave your brother, the brother you suddenly have, in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front veranda. Sometimes, he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice-cream cone!” – because that is what brothers left out of the father-and-daughter bond do to claim their ground. But you, in the patronizing tones of the older sister, call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn your head.
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