Because of You

Front matter

Evgenia liopoulou

Understanding Second-Person Storytelling

Evgenia Iliopoulou Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling

Preface

This thesis is the result of a critical investigation that began in April 2011. It started as a study of interactive fiction that aspired to contribute to the topic by exploring the reader's active participation and involvement in the text. Necessitating constant modification over the years, the research has generated in me an abiding interest in second-person storytelling that evolved to become the actual theme of this thesis. This research aims to improve our understanding of the phenomenon within the literary paradigm.

Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling had its origins in open text formats and experimental narratives along the lines of “choose your own adventure" stories such as Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore and extended to cyber texts. This wide range of narrative typologies offered grounds for exploring interactivity in a multidisciplinary manner, afforded by the dialogic dimension of the second person in other media as well as in non-fiction employments. Once the research centred on fiction and second-person narratives, the question regarding the grade and nature of the reader's interaction with the text proved to be indicative of the richness of second-person storytelling.

Italo Calvino's novel marked a transition in my research. Thematising reading and the reader-author relationship in a unique and emphatic way, his novel immersed me in the concept of address-dominated narratives. It introduced me to the richness and dynamics of the second-person narrative technique by revealing some of its main characteristics such as its ludic character, self-reflexivity and intertextuality. Though Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore was not selected for the close-reading part of this thesis, it still needs to be mentioned as a benchmark and catalyst for my research and the formulation of key ideas and assumptions.

One major challenge that I faced in defining the actual focus of my research was the angle and perspective I should most profitably employ. Since neither theory nor criticism were offering satisfactory answers or ideas, neglecting as they were the rich history of second-person examples in literature and the adaptation of the technique in lyrics and drama, I often reached dead ends having embarked on misleading cognitive routes. Once I had decided to follow a more inductive method towards drawing my conclusions by focussing on the fundamentals of person, pronoun, grammar and rhetoric, the texts themselves provided the answer. One key observation I made was that though second-person texts have been continually present and diverse in the history of literature, they also reflected an intriguing uniqueness as they always appeared only once in the oeuvre of their authors.

This observation generated questions about the kind of stories that authors prefer to tell in the second person. Exploring their methods and reasons for doing so, as well as studying the implications ofthe technique, helped to define the aims of my study. Instead of ambitiously seeking homogeneity and common characteristics that would enable me gradually to model a theory of second-person fiction, I was fascinated to notice some affinities between prayers and postmodern texts, texts from medieval times and the nouveau roman, epic poems and recent prose: it seemed as if second-person texts belonged to a literary history that involves an eternal dialogue between texts and authors. My focus then moved to intertextuality but only so as to establish a dialogue as I was reluctant to impose any generalisations or groupings. Examples such as Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster, Michel Butor's La Modification, Georges Perec's Un homme qui dort, Ilse Aichinger’s Spiegelgeschichte, Günter Grass's Katz und Maus, Frederick Barthelme's stories in Moon Deluxe and Paul Auster's Winter Journal, though all written in the second

Preface person, are different enough from each other to require examination as individual case studies.

Choosing autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical examples written in the second person, I have strengthened my focus on the I-you relationship and orientated my research onto the possible reasons why the first person is missing, is disguised, silenced or implied in these second-person novels. Reflecting on my readings, observations and my selection of texts and trying to transform these reflections into writing, I encountered elements that were decisive for my study even at a later stage of my doctorate: the alternating power of every process of representation; the dynamics of language and self-reflexivity; the constant transformations and modifications of the narrative; the idea of multiple versions of a life, of a self, of an I, one that could be better expressed by a you as, for example, in Butor's La Modification, revealing the close though important distance between the evolving poles of the I-you constellation.

On completing my readings and having articulated all my thoughts and speculations, I managed to explain the second-person enigma as a liminal technique that reflects liminal narrative circumstances while always engaging the reader in a role that's not merely passive. I found that I had reached my aim of understanding second-person storytelling better. This is reflected in the understanding of the textual examples and in the analysis of the four texts of the second part, in revisiting the fundamentals of grammar and rhetoric and in listing the origins, implications and rich elaborations of the phenomenon. It was further proved by my writing of the first and final chapters of this thesis only when I had finished the part on the texts themselves, treating them not only as the object but also as the source of my research.

In undertaking this research and writing this thesis I benefited from the advice and encouragement of many people. First and foremost, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Thomas Fries and Prof. Dr. Sandro Zanetti for supervising my work. Their example, teaching and support helped me realise the project. Thanks to my friends for the fruitful discussions and interest.

I would also like to offer sincere thanks and gratitude to my family for their unstinting support over all these years. Mom, Dad, Ilia, our we, no matter the constellation it took over the years, has been always safeguarding my I, and the development of my thoughts on you. Thank you for giving me the courage to embark on this journey, remain on that path and complete what I started.

to that person

Table of Contents

Preface | 5 PART 1 INTRODUCTION

Prologue | 14

The Second-Person Enigma |15 Theory |21

PART 2 CLOSE READING 2.1 Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster Learning to Say "I" | 83

The Main Narrative Components | 85

Narrative Levels: Nelly Jordan | 93

Narrative Levels: The Narrator | 101

Other Narrative Levels | 108

Conclusion | 113

2.2 Michel Butor's La Modification Addressing the Unknown | 121

The Novel | 123

Léon's Adventure | 126

The Adventure of Writing | 137

The Narrative Perspective | 140

Conclusion | 147

2.3 George Perec's Un homme qui dort A Jigsaw Puzzle of Literary Pieces | 153

The Novel | 154

The Script of the Experiment | 159

The Script of Intertextuality | 169

The Narrative Perspective | 178

Conclusion | 182

2.4 Ilse Aichinger's Spiegelgeschichte At the End the Beginning |187 The Question Reversed | 187 The Two Plots | 190 The Two Narrators | 205 The Theme of Reversal and Transformation | 209 Conclusion | 218

PART 3 ASSESSMENT Overview | 224

Methodology | 226

Observations Regarding the First Part | 229 Observations Regarding the Second Part | 234 Impact and Continuity | 244

Limitations of This Study | 245

Prologue

The writing of this dissertation was occasioned by a constellation of contradictory aspects: the existence of various fascinating texts written in the second person, each a unique and remarkable work of art, combined with a general lack of understanding of second-person novels on the part of critics and theorists not to mention publishers who tend to treat second-person texts either with extreme doubt and suspicion or, on the contrary, believing in their success irrespective of the quality of the book. Subsequently, the aim of this project is to clarify aspects of second-person storytelling as an enigmatic literary phenomenon associated with a narrative technique that has certain key properties and is appropriate on certain narrative occasions.

It hopes to further support the understanding of this technique by focussing on the grammatical, poetic and rhetorical implications that accompany it and to clarify elements that are often overlooked. These elements may appear obvious to deal with at the very beginning, since they are related to fundamental categories of storytelling and language like, for example, person and pronoun, but they are nonetheless still complicated, especially when used in fictional narratives. This overview aspires to shed light on what the second person stands for in storytelling.

My dissertation, entitled Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling, approaches second-person narratives not as a group that needs to be classified as a genre, but as separate narratives that each feature the same technique but with different poetic and rhetorical connotations. The project is not a theoretical attempt aspiring to culminate in a strict definition of what the second-person narrative technique is. Rather it approaches the technique in an inductive way: observations on the texts themselves form the basis for assumptions and any conclusions are the stronger for it as they are drawn with regard to the enigmatic and poetic character of the technique, aiming to clarify its essential elements and rhetorical tropes that are used in numerous ways within a particular narrative.

The Second-Person Enigma

THE SECOND-PERSON ENIGMA

Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is perhaps the best recognised and well-known second-person text among contemporary readers. Published in 1979, the novel is a strange narrative collage composed of the beginnings of ten different novels which are interrupted by a second narrative strand in which a Reader (the protagonist of the novel) is in search of some missing pages of the book he is reading, the same book that the actual reader (you or I) has in hand. Thematising the composition of his own book and addressing the Reader directly, Calvino surprised both the readers and critics of his time with the striking way in which he addressed formal questions of narration through the operation of address, a gesture that caused a long-lasting debate on the style and literary virtues of Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore in general and second-person storytelling in particular.

Indeed, the suspicion and doubt expressed in relation to Calvino's book is not something new when it comes to second-person fiction. Second-person novels have frequently been treated as experimental novelties that either deter a readership from engaging with them or, on the contrary, attract the attention of readers by their catchy technique irrespective of their literary virtues. Paradoxically this technique that is often seen as tricky or even unpopular has been a narrative mode continuously employed throughout the history of literature, and in many instances even acclaimed in prize-winning novels such as Ilse Aichinger's Spiegelgeschichte that was honoured

1 | Italo Calvino, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. 1979. (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 1994) 3.

with the Group 47 prize in 1952. Also puzzling is the fact that while many authors have reported problems getting their books published due to the employment of the second-person technique in the past, the situation lately seems to be completely reversed as we witness a rapid growth of second-person texts emerging on the literary scene, especially in the Anglophone world.

In an attempt to defend his work, Calvino in December 1979 published an essay in the “Alfabeta” journal in which he rephrased the title of the novel as Se una notte d'inverno un narratore? in response to Angelo Guglielmi's criticism of his novel's challenging style and form. Five years later, at a conference held at the Institute of Italian Culture in Buenos Aires in 1984, he defended his novel and his compositional choices, emphasising the self-reflective character of his book, the pleasure of reading and, of course, that of writing.

As a patchwork of literary beginnings of books that the author could have written but didn't, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore not only reveals vital components of the writing process but it also highlights the reading process by exposing it to the reader and making it a central theme of the novel. Calvino's book is a marginal self-reflexive text in which the employment of the second-person narrative voice establishes the unique reader-author relationship that the author treats as a major theme of the book. The playful way in which Calvino decides to address his readership and the fragmented char-

2 | Calvino (1979/1994), v-xiv. 3 | Italo Calvino, // Libro, i Libri. (Buenos Aires: Nuovi quaderni italiani, 1984) 19.

The Second-Person Enigma acter of his narrative not only challenge the norms of traditional storytelling but also any reading of the book itself, as readers have to deal with having their position put under scrutiny in various ways: through the theme of reading, by being addressed by and identified with the Reader of the narrative, by struggling with a work of fragments and missing pages that constantly gets interrupted just as the main character of the story (the Reader) is.

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore puts a double emphasis on the Reader, firstly by presenting him as the main character of the narrative and secondly by its composition in the second-person narrative mode in which the concept of address dominates. The second-person technique presupposes, or demands, active readers who continually accept or reject their involvement in the story. The continual challenge and ambiguity outlined above presented by reading Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore can be described as the enigma of second-person storytelling. It is an enigma that can also be found, to varying degrees, in response to other second-person texts. In Calvino's novel, however, since the reading challenge also dominates the plot, the enigma is expanded from rhetoric to a more theoretical and metatextual context. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore is unique as it discusses theory (that of the second person and Reader Response theory) by being it.

This novel has been the foundational text of my research and its starting point, giving rise to concepts and thoughts on sec ond-person narrative technique and how the concept of address operates. It establishes revealingly the link between the employment of the second person and the reader (the addressee) as well as the association of the technique with self-reflexivity and intertextuality, and it does so in a ludic and hence experimental narrative. These are all features that belong to second-person storytelling. However, though Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore has been essential to setting the cognitive grounds of this study, as my research evolved it proved to be a less good example for understanding the second person as it emphasises the Reader-Author constellation at the expense of the rhetoric of the second person per se.

With the aim of understanding the second-person technique, this project has developed a basic typology of address. It reflects a continuous shifting between different addressees which is derived from the classic notion of apostrophe and expressed rhetorically as such; it also reflects a mid-distance between narrator and narrated as seen in narratives in which the narrator is not alienated from the narrative but neither is he/she involved the actual moment of narration; it further reflects the second person as an open and ambiguous form, a placeholder for the indefinite and undetermined in the discourse thus, in many cases, enabling narrative depth and complexity.

The above typology is the result of reading and attempting to classify, or at least identify, common features in the long history of second-person literature. In the second part of this project four narratives have been selected for a detailed analysis. They reflect this basic typology and classification and offer the grounds to explore vital aspects of the technique in detail. The texts chosen belong to German and French cold- and post-war period literature, and by addressing different themes they employ the second person in different forms (tu and vous, du) and narrative modes.

The first novel discussed, Kindheitsmuster by Christa Wolf (1976), is the story of a narrator who, after several failed attempts at composing her childhood autobiography in the traditional first-person narrative form, decides to do so in the third, making a narrative persona out of her past self and conducting a continual self-inquisitive (second-person) dialogue while writing. Wolf's Kindheitsmuster is a fine example of the different levels of distance the pronominal forms reflect in the discourse. Her example is followed by La Modification by Michel Butor (1957), a novel reflecting the nouveau roman period and showing the process of decision-making on a train journey that coincides with the main narrative in progress. In Butor's self-reflexive narrative the second-person technique is employed to depict the making of a narrative persona and a novel. Here the second-person technique reveals in detail the character's surroundings, and through the consistent use of the polite vous it

The Second-Person Enigma invites the reader into the fictional world, which is being composed the moment it is read. The generation of the novel in Butor reflects the generation of its key persona as the plot chronicles a process of self-awareness and story of re-establishing self-authority.

The third novel discussed is Un homme qui dort by George Perec (1967), a text often associated with Butor's La Modification due to their temporal and linguistic proximity and the employment of the second-person technique. Perec presents a tu-narrative rich in intertextual implications that shows a student performing an experiment in social detachment by abandoning his own I, which is constantly addressed in the second person. Perec's narrative echoes earlier texts that summarised indifference or that involved similar narrative modes and offers a basis for focussing on intertextuality and its role in understanding the second-person technique. What is important to mention here is that in Perec, the second person functions as a narrative figure throughout the narrative; it generates a constant shifting towards different addressees — the heroes and references from other texts — and designates a narrative topos that includes all references and literary influences that coexist in Perec's narrative persona until the latter becomes concrete and can be referred to with the pronoun used (tu).

The last text discussed in the project is Ilse Aichinger's Spiegelgeschichte (1949), a most enigmatic and complex text that challenges the reader with its theme as it shows episodes from the life of a dying woman in a hospital bed in reverse and is interrupted by a narrative level external to the woman (third person). Ilse Aichinger presents a rather short text in which an indeterminate voice, undefined until the end of the narrative, keeps addressing the woman throughout her situation and tells these life episodes in reverse order. Striking is the fact that this reversed flow affects the meanings of the events and their relationship, hence reasons appear as results and connotations of happiness or sadness have a reverse implication. Aichinger, like Perec, creates a story without a legitimate narrative figure, introducing a voice narrator and a dying main narrative figure who is a passive recipient of the narrative. Intriguing also is the fact that in

Spiegelgeschichte, the analysis is subject to this reversal as well, since the main question to be answered here is not the referent of the second person but its origin as well as the relationship the woman shares with this voice.

The texts outlined above are not presented in chronological order but according to the complexity ofthe narrative strategy ofthe second person they employ; this order of presentation aims to clarify the various issues and questions associated with or arising from the use of the second-person narrative mode and serves the understanding of the technique gradually. It is the ambivalence and contradiction inherent in second-person narrative that deserves further discussion. Intriguing, moreover, is the fact that second-person narrative is possible in all forms of storytelling, and for reasons related to its audience-oriented character and its effect on the I it is found in different media, even in non-fiction: Theatre, Cinema, Video Games, Advertising, Social Media platforms and Hypnosis. Its versatile appearance in different media and in literature and its ambiguous though resilient nature per se make the second person an exciting phenomenon to study, though it is rather challenging to choose an appropriate angle from which to do so.

The fundamentals for pursuing this close-reading analysis and the basic tools of this inductive research are listed in the first part of this project. This part focuses on establishing a fundamental understanding of the second person, starting from the essentials of grammar and rhetoric and discussing the fundamental category of person and pronoun, gesturing towards understanding more precisely what the second person and the second-person pronoun are. To explain this review and methodology, the first part involves a brief and selective summary of theoretical contributions that centre on second-person fiction but that have proven insufficient for this research since they do not reflect the historical continuity of the phenomenon and its versatile employment in different poetic forms. Hence in this part of the project a historical overview of the phenomenon is included, one that traces its development through the years: based on a rich anthology of second-person narratives, the rhetorical tropes and figures that appear systematically within the technique are summarised. This section stresses the continuity and importance of the technique and the problems associated with its study which are linked to the fact that often the obvious, for example the problem of person considered as (purely) grammatical or not, is the most difficult to talk about.

The thesis ends with a chapter that outlines and elaborates on what was discussed so far and compares the four narrative examples expanding on some ofthe major assumptions mentioned only briefly along the way and listing the final conclusions regarding the poetic value and rhetorical impact of the second person in fiction. Because of You: Understanding Second-Person Storytelling aims to show the potential of employing the narrative you in a text and improve its understanding. By doing so it aspires to draw some conclusions on what it is about the second-person perspective that makes it so appealing and intriguing for readers and writers alike, despite being discouraging at times.

Attempts to theorise the second-person narrative technique have so far proved ill advised due to the nature of the research object, which is too resilient and broad to be classified as a genre. Given that the second-person narrative technique participates in different genres involving numerous employments, functions and characteristics, it is hard to formulate a summary (theory) based on a single example that would reflect the mode as a whole. Another obstacle to the theorising process is the binary thinking of traditional theorists (and their successors) that bases thoughts and assumptions on pairs of oppositions that can only show the second person as a special case, an experimental and exceptional narrative phenomenon.

4 | Émile Benveniste. Problèmes de linguistique générale I. (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) 226.

It is striking that major theorists such as Gérard Genette and Franz Stanzel play down the second person as a narrative mode, devoting just a few lines to it. Though Genette deals with many of the issues related to the second-person narrative mode and even acknowledges the problem of distance within the narrative (problem with the self over time, perspective, point of view within storytelling), he fails to examine it in connection with the second-person technique, since his study focuses on first- and third-person narratives only, handling the second person as a special case that appears to be an exception. Where he focuses on the opposition between diegesis and mimesis (telling and showing), second-person narratives remain unmentioned and are omitted from his triadic notional model, based on the concepts of distance, point of view and person.

This is because Genette's theory is based on dichotomies, such as that of hetero- and homodiegesis, which are not applicable to second-person narratives that are treated in his work as a special form, a sub-category of heterodiegesis. Genette fails to cover the numerous other cases of second-person texts in which, for example, the narrator as well as the narratee participate in the actions recounted at the level of plot and which therefore cannot be defined as heterodiegetic. The theorist prefers the terms heterodiegetic and homodiegetic rather than person to determine the position of the narrator in the narration, which depicts clearly that narrative voices tend to designate the roles within the narrative and are strongly associated with pronouns, functioning as placeholders. Consequently, Genette's terminology addresses the relatedness or even identification/tautology of the experiencing and narrating self rather than that particular persona per se. When writing about the second person, his theoretical assumption tends to refer to an elaboration or expansion of the intradiegetic narrator, thus undermining and reducing the phenomenon.

Un narrateur intradiégétique, narrataire intradiégétique, et le récit des Grieux ou de Bixiou ne s'adresse pas au lecteur de Manon Lescaut ou de la Maison Nucingen, mais bien au seul M. de Renoncourt, aux seuls Finot,

Courture et Blondet, que désignent seuls les marques de "deuxiéme personne" éventuellement présentes dans le texte, tout comme celles qu'on trouvera dans un roman par lettres ne peuvent désigner que le correspondant épistolaire. Nous, lecteurs, ne pouvons pas plus nous identifier à ces narrataires fictifs que ces narrateurs intradiégétiques ne peuvent s'adresser à nous, ni même supposer notre existence.”

Franz Stanzel based his theory on the realms of existence, and he offered an elaborated depiction of the narrative issues puzzling readers and theorists with his famous typological circle (Typenkreis). Here again, the second-person narrative cannot be correctly positioned, because of the broad character of the second-person technique and the potential inherent in the pronoun to take over several roles and functions in the discourse. However, even taking into account this drawback, Stanzel's concept, pictured in a theoretical circle, is more applicable to the second-person technique than Genette's since it implies the notion of gradation.

first-person tj x auchornal narrative E " narrative situation r AN Situation ^ Q w Te x Cn, Q0 j x ty Pa ex 7, svt Or) T ; “ler, ae si FG y

02221121 figural narrative Situation

5 | Gérard Genette, Figures Ill. (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1972) 265.

Like Genette, Stanzel classifies literature in terms of binary opposites, with the second person failing to fit in. Second-person fiction involves dual narrative personae with double qualities — both figural and authorial — and therefore should always be treated on a case-by-case basis. The same is true for the narrative perspective: it is not quite clear where examples such as Perec's Un homme qui dort should be located, that may portray the internal perspective of the narrated, but present it as if it were external. Stanzel's typological circle is not applicable to second-person narratives as a whole as it doesn't depict their cohesive elements. However valuable it may be for the study of second-person storytelling as a reflection of the Other, he defines second-person narrative more as a self-dramatised I, a negation of the first-person narrator constellation that relates to other narrative modes:

Der Ich-Erzáhler von J.D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, steht als Hauptfigur der Erzáhlung mitten in der fiktionalen Welt, die der Roman darstellt. Die Identitát der Seinsbereiche des Erzáhlers und der übrigen Charaktere ist also unzweifelhaft gegeben, sie bleibt auch aufrecht angesichts der Neigung dieses Ich- Erzáhlers, sich mit seinem Anliegen direkt an den Leser zu wenden.

Stanzel uses the term Transponierungsziel’ to describe the modifying process that an extrovertierter (probably second-person) narrator creates between the two main poles: the first-person narrator of the events and the more distanced narrator who is at a remove from the narrated incidents and dramatic time. The gap between these two narrative territories could be covered by the second-person mode, but for Stanzel it designates one of the major properties of the original text as a basic story in the author's mind. According to Stanzel, it should not be considered an open slot for an additional narrative

6 | Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie des Erzáhlens. 1979. (Góttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2001) 82. 7 | Stanzel (1979/2001), 83.

mode but rather a literary achievement, viewed as an exceptional narrative performance of an elevated and remarkable narrative style.

By converting the dramatised I, as Stanzel describes sec ond-person narrators, into a third-person narrator, the experience and the inner world of the hero can be projected without discontinuities in the appropriate mode. Consequently, whereas Stanzel reveals the narrative territory covered by the second-person transgressive form, he avoids describing it in words and thus fails to cover the second-person phenomenon in his theoretical work. Of course, the reason why both theorists didn't devote more analysis or thought to the second-person phenomenon is the period during which they wrote their essays. At that time, second-person texts were only beginning to appear on the literary scene with the works of Butor and Aichinger, which were still viewed as exceptional and experimental cases of fiction.

[...] der Zusammenhang zwischen Erlebnis und Erzählung, der durch die Identitát der Seinsbereiche des Erzáhlers und der dargestellten Wirklichkeit gegeben ist, ohne schwerwiegende Eingriffe in das Sinngefüge des Romans nicht gelóst werden kann. Eine Transponierung der Ich-Erzáhlung in eine Er-Erzáhlung würde aber die Lósung dieses Zusammenhangs voraussetzen.?

As the second-person narrative came to enjoy increasing popularity especially in the Anglophone world after the 1950s, recent theorists, principally Monika Fludernik, Brian Richardson and Irene Kacandes, approached the narrative phenomenon more systematically than their predecessors. However, their work emphasised very specific issues such as reader identification and the transgressive character of literature, restricting their view to the experimental aspect of the technique and missing vital parts of its rhetorical and poetic sense.

Eine besonders auffállige Konstellation ist die Du-Erzáhlung, in der die Geschichte einer Leserfigur geschildert wird. Im Deutschen ist diese Variante des Figurenverháltnisses zwischen Erzáhlebene und Geschichtsebene eher selten, wáhrend in der englischsprachigen Literatur und in den romanischen Sprachen eine Vielzahl von Werken dieser Machart existiert.?

Up to this point, second-person theory, while reflecting on a larger number of texts and richer in examples than the older theorists, could be characterised as a rather multi-generic discipline that mixed methods and schools and focused above all on determining the pronoun's reference. This paradoxical attempt is in vain, however, because it contradicts the shifting nature of reference made possible by the pronoun. Recent views also tend to search for ways in which to apply existing theory; as a result, new theories tend to propose neologisms rather than produce fresh, innovative and more elaborate readings of the texts themselves. Despite these problems and potential flaws, this project appreciates the conclusions drawn in theory so far, expanding on them in order to enhance an understanding of the second-person narrative technique and present it in the most precise and enlightening way.