Second-Person Narratives in Non-Fiction

Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj

doi:10.32798/pflit.53

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyse the particularity of second-person narratives in non-fiction. Their special status results from the fact that telling another person his or her own story is a convention in fiction but occurs rarely in everyday communication. In non-fiction narratives, the problem of different perspectives (of the narrator and the addressee) is particularly valid, i.e. often the point of view of the narrative “you” is only a disguised point of view of the “I.” The analysis of A Man by Oriana Fallaci shows the shift from the melting of perspectives to an evident distance. In Hanna Krall’s Hamlet, the “I” presents the “you” with an ultimate interpretation of his life.

Highlights

In some parts of the reportage, Krall describes events that were beyond his knowledge or occurred after his death
The aim of the article is to analyse the particularity of second-person narratives in non-fiction
Their special status results from the fact that telling another person his or her own story is a convention in fiction but occurs rarely in everyday communication

Summary

Tools of poetics for non-fiction

Making referential narratives a separate case in narratology inevitably leads to a fundamental question: Does analysing non-fiction require specific, distinctive tools? In Polish literary studies it was Michał Głowiński who gave an unequivocal answer to this question by claiming that the instruments of poetics, tested and perfected on the analysis of the most complicated literary texts, are capable of dealing with any type of discourse.[3]. The tools of poetics seem to be appropriate for another important reason: in the last few decades a process of novelisation (Głowiński’s term9) of non-fiction can be observed The precursors of this tendency − the American New Journalists in the 1970s − borrowed narrative techniques from 19th-century realist novelists (most often from Dickens), whereas their successors have imitated most of the narrative eccentrisms (or, as Brian Richardson would put it, extremisms10) of the postmodern novel. Addressing the actual reader (for instance ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’) is a form that is commonly used in a reportage The latter refers to a situation when the main protagonist of the (actual) story is its addressee; it must be underscored that even within this narrow understanding of second-person narration there exists a number of permutations resulting from the complexity of communicational roles. It combines Stanzel’s opposition of the teller/reflector mode with Genette’s homo- and heterodiegesis; even the most useful typology cannot replace a case study analysis

Naturalising the second person

Summary