Lilia at Mathemagenic posted:

Was writing email answering questions about blogging and realised that I often do a trick. When I write about my own experiences I often start with I ("I blog because it's fun"), but somehow in between I switch to talking about you ("when you start blogging you often discover how fun it is").

After reading her words I had to go back and re-edit my Ultimate Blogger entry because I too had changed point of view in the middle of my essay, moving from first-person major to second-person. Later while making changes to my DG chapter, adding description on - among other things - the narrators perspective in each example, I ran across this quote:

Although earlier we stated that there are primarily four points of view from which a story may be seen and told [first-person major character, first-person minor character, third-person omniscient, and third-person observer], we now must add one additional point of view. The second-person point of view is rare, but is becoming more and more prevalent, especially in contemporary, postmodern literature. In second-person stories, the narrator uses the pronoun "you," and seems directly to address the reader. We are apparently invited to become part of the work, to become more actively involved in the creation of the events than in first- or third-person texts. But who is the "you"? The difficulty and complexity offered by these stories involves the identification of this slippery "you." ...the pronoun "you," has many referents. Is the "you" the reader? Could the "you" be the narrator? Could the "you" be the author Is the "you" some character in the story? The answer varies depending on the work (Yordon, 1999, p. 171).

So from a Goffmanian perspective are we as authors inviting our audience into our performance as narrators or are we addressing our fractured selves as author to narrator or visa versa? Personally it's the former...I get so tired of typing "I" in first-person stories it begins to feel so narcissistic. So I switch to you for the general parts of the story, the parts that would be roughly the same had they been preformed by any member of the general public. Though the switch in point of view can be jarring and I really shouldn't do it. Pick one point of view and stick with it. *S*

Reference List

Yordon, Judy E. (1999). Roles in Interpretation. (4th ed.) New York: McGraw-Hill College.

Posted by prolurkr at May 3, 2005 08:03 PM

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