Transmission through pronominal displacement in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Tomorrow is too Far” (2009)

Abstract

This article focuses on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story, “Tomorrow is Too Far”, one of the two short stories written in the second person in her 2009 The Thing Around Your Neck collection. It aims at showing to what extent the referential and address functions of you in this story are blended in a way very specific to Adichie’s writing, as compared with other narratological and stylistic configurations designed by you-narratives that I have studied elsewhere (Sorlin 2022). I will explore the purposes of its use in this trauma story, by first showing that communication is marked by indirectness, either through indirect reporting of characters’ exchanges or with the reader who is positioned as an ‘overhearer’ by a narratorial voice that could be referred to, in parallel, as the ‘overspeaker’ – that is the equivalent of a cinematic ‘voice-over’ – bringing readers to align with its perspective in the attention to be paid to the ‘you-character’. Lastly I will bring to light the number of metaleptic displacements that accompany the pronominal displacement, through which another narrative is obliquely transmitted, behind the one at hand, and conveyed by grammatical and syntactic markers of exclusion and invisibilisation of the unnamed female you protagonist.