. "A Thing of Beauty" and "Second Person." The Miner's Pale Children.
Part 3, "The Night Chanter," is partly written in the second person.
Diego sections are in the second person. Present-tense narrative.
Rita Gnutzmann's informative article on what she calls "the novel in the second person" ("la novela...
The major three types of second-person story (viewed from the perspective of their relation to a realist reading of the text) are (a) "I" and "you" narratives (in which the narrator shares a fictional past with the narratee and can therefore be "in the know" about it); (b) the entirely nonrealistic case of a pure rendering of a second person's consciousness; and (c) the playful metafictional case of a deliberate manipulation of the irreality and ambiguity factors of the second-person pronoun.
I will start with the use of the second person in St.
Max Frisch's "Burleske" - the narrative prose sketch from which his famous play Biedermann und die Brandstifter developed - is written in the second person, and it describes the bourgeois mentality to a T.
Such play with the ambiguity of the second person typically occurs at the beginning of texts, where - as we have noted - the reader appears to be addressed in person or as a generalized "you." At the end of texts one may also suddenly encounter a shift into a different frame: one discovers, for instance, that the addressee and protagonist is dead (although she or he appeared to be the recipient of the narrator's allocution); that this addressee-protagonist does not "really" exist, that he or she has merely been fantasized by the speaker; or one encounters narratives of internal focalization where the text suddenly acquires an addressee and then destroys the previous illusion of immediacy.(20)
I have documented such a case in "Second Person Fiction" by the example of Joyce Carol Oates's "You," where the "you" protagonist, the actress Madeline, emerges as the addressee of her daughter's discourse, and - in the final scene of the tale - one may (or may not) conclude that the entire discourse took place in the daughter's mind while she was waiting for her mother's arrival at the airport.