Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan

Abstract

Abstract For a century, the disorienting effects of second-person narration have seemed peculiarly well suited to representing the experiential confusions and political contradictions of inhabiting a female body in times of national crisis. This essay examines such effects in Edna O’Brien’s A pagan place and Jennifer Egan’s “Black box,” very different narratives that similarly exploit the deictic and ontological uncertainties of second-person address. Second person in O’Brien’s novel participates in its depiction of a sexually naïve rural Irish girl confronting the conflicting pressures of enforced chastity and reproductive futurism in the name of the Irish State. Emphasis is placed on the narrative’s unusual use of past-tense second-person narration and its intriguing overlap with O’Brien’s nonfictional writings. In Egan’s story, the protean and multivocal second person suggests a sinister fusion of individual and governmental agency, effected through the protagonist’s cybernetically-enhanced body. The result is a deceptively simple critique of post-9/11 American foreign policy as an extension of paternalism and patriarchy in the domestic sphere. The patterns investigated in this paper shed light on other recent uses of the second person in other experimental narratives concerned with identity, self-formation among disenfranchised individuals, and resistance to political and cultural oppression.