Essay # 1 Narrator & Character

Essay # 1
Narrator & Character
2-3 pp. in APA Style

The Identity of the Second Person Narrator: In his Glossary of Literary Terms, Abrams (1999) tells us that the second person narrator “may turn out to be a specific fictional character, or the reader of the story, or even the narrator himself or herself, or not clearly or consistently the one or the other; and the story may unfold by shifting between telling the narratee what he or she is now doing, has done in the past, or will or is commanded to do in the future” (p. 234). There are two stories on our reading list that employ second person narration. Discuss how the narrator functions in each story in relation to the Abrams quotation above and discuss the unique effect of second-person narration using examples from the two stories.