at running the gallery and thought that nobody could touch you
at it. You wondered whether your bluntness sometimes caused
offence, if you would be hijacked by your own honesty. But you
couldn’t turn art into profit and loss, and that was that.Here the narrator posits what she imagines to be Sophie’s point of view by
confronting her as narratee with her ideas about it. The second person
form gives the narrator a certain power, even enabling her to take the
moral high ground (although I am treating the narrator as female, gender
again is ambiguous).
The second person can also be employed in narration to set up ambi-
guities about who is being addressed, and is used most often in
experimental fictions. By means of the pronoun ‘you’, the narrator can
speak partly to someone else in the narrative, and partly to the audience,
thereby implicating the reader in what is happening (this mode of address
is also often to be found in poetry). And the second person can be used
very effectively, on occasion, to imply a split subjectivity, so that one part
of the self seems to be looking to see what the other half is doing, so that
the self is both acting and acted upon. The short story ‘Shopgirls’, by
American writer Frederick Barthelme (1989), is a very good example of
second person narration.
We would normally expect the narratee, if apparent, to have a sustained
presence. However, in an experimental narrative the narratee might
appear and disappear from the narrative in a disconcerting and unsettling
way. By this means, it would be possible to call into question not only who
is telling the story, but to whom it is being told.
The subject positions
The question of the narratee leads us to the issue of subject position. We
have already seen how the narration can be written in the first and third
person, or less commonly, in the second person. Exercise 3 asks you to
write a passage in two ways, one that fixes the subject position and one
that unsettles it.
In many short stories and novels the grammatical position is kept the
same all the way through. In most narratives there is a tendency to stabilise
the grammatical position of the narration, but experimental narratives
might shift from one grammatical position to another: the quicker and
more frequent the move, the more disruptive it becomes. This unsettles
our sense of subject position, of who the subject is, the position that he or
she is adopting, and of his or her relationship to others in the story. Let’s
transpose part of Sophie’s story into an experimental mode in which—her
92 The Writing Experiment