A Study on the Second-Person Narrative in Jennifer Egan’s &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Black Box&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;

Baoyu Nie

doi:10.4236/jss.2015.310008

Abstract

Notable for the second-person Twitter narrative, Jennifer Egan’s 2012 short science fiction Black Box is one of the most triumphant and fully-fledged fictions written in the form of new media. This paper mainly explores the second-person narrative employed in Black Box, pointing out that the second-person narrative leads the reader to participate in the story, allowing the reader to sense the same feelings as the protagonist does. From the second person’s perspective, Egan expresses her concerns and worries about the security of the American security as well as the whole world in the post-”9·11” period and at the same time she embraces the virtues and pleasures of traditional storytelling delivered through a wholly new digital format. This paper concludes that Black Box is perhaps one of the boldest experiments of narrative form and it is a direct exploration into the contemporary image culture.

Highlights

Jennifer Egan (1963-), winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, is a contemporary American fiction writer with popular appeal and a novelist of ideas noted for the elegance of her style
Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus (1995); Emerald City and Other Stories (1997); Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001; The Keep (2006), a national bestseller after its publication; and A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Told in second-person narrative, the serialized tweeting format of Black Box released via computer, iPhone or iPad brings the reader immediate reading experience, allowing the reader to sense the same feelings as the protagonist does

Summary

Introduction

Jennifer Egan (1963-), winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, is a contemporary American fiction writer with popular appeal and a novelist of ideas noted for the elegance of her style. After trained as a spy and being planted high-tech equipment in the body by the American National Security Department, a woman was sent to the Mediterranean area to steal highly secret information from some powerful men, who were thought to be terrorists to threaten the American security As she went undercoverly among such suspected terrorists by deploying badger game, she kept a mental log of events in her body and her physical person was the “Black Box”. The story was originally nearly twice its present length and it took her a year to control and calibrate that material into the published Black Box. It is not easy to write a science fiction in the form of “pure literature”, let alone composing a vivid Twitter story, but Egan succeeds by using her unique “weapon”: the narrative strategies. Employing the “nonnatural” second person or imperative voice, and labeling individuals as contextual types such as the Designated Mate, the new host and the alpha beauty, the story written in the Twitter form is rich in character, situation, description, atmosphere, and setting

Literature Review on Second-Person Narrative

Second-Person Narrative in Black Box

Conclusion