When You is Me: Sustained Second-person Narrative Voice in the Works of G.M. Glaskin and Peter Kocan

Abstract

It is almost universally agreed that sustained second-person narration in fiction is hard to manage, and that second-person narrative voice is very rarely used because of this difficulty. Whether or not this is true, the employment of sustained second person narrative form in literary fiction in English has not been as prevalent as the corresponding first-person and third-person forms. One difficulty is that it directly addresses the reader, making the reader complicit with the narrative voice. But this can be used to very good effect, setting up a collaboration of reader and writer where 'you' becomes 'me'. This paper explores the use of sustained second-person narrative in G. M. Glaskin's No End to the Way and Peter Kocan's The Treatment.