The Nuances of the Second Person

We've talked quite a bit about Lorrie Moore's use of the second person to narrate most of her stories. Recently we touched on the fact that there seems to be different types of the second person that she uses in different stories, I just wanted to elaborate on the wide variety of "flavors" of the second person that we get in Self-Help.

The first of these, in "How to be an Other Woman," is a mix of imperative commands that narrate the plot and descriptive sections that tell you what you are doing and help build the setting. For example the first line of the story is one of these imperative commands: "Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night." and later, "First stand in front of Florsheim's...Draw a peace sign..." (3). But the whole story isn't just commands. Later in the first section we are exposed to the more descriptive, "setting the scene" flavor of Moore's second person: "You are waiting for a bus...You climb on together, grab adjacent chrome posts, and when the bus hisses and rumbles forward, you take out a book" (3). This "flavor" is the basic foundation for the other varieties that Moore uses.

The next flavor of the second person, in "How," is similar to that of "How to be an Other Woman" with one major difference: the addition of uncertainty. "How’s” narrative voice presents the reader with a number of alternatives of how a situation could have come to be. For example, "Begin by meeting him in a class, in a bar, at a rummage sale. Maybe he teaches sixth grade. Manages a hardware store. Foreman at a carton factory" (55). One important thing about this flavor is that even if it seems like there is some choice or variability in how the situations described in "How" came to be, the outcome is always the same. 

The last example of a new variation is seen in "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)." This story is written almost entirely in the "imperative command" style. Short commanding phrases that are telling you to "do this" or "say that." There are examples of this throughout the story. "Learn to repeat things.... Make apple crisp for the first time" (89). "Eat Chinese food for the first time with a lawyer from California...Attack his profession. Ask him whether he feels..." (91). This flavor creates a more choppy, "scene by scene" kind of effect that works well in this story since "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)" is written as a timeline of short events.

Of course there are probably other examples of many other subtle "flavors" of Lorrie Moore's second person but these were the ones that stuck out to me. Each flavor is unique, but not necessarily better or worse than the others, they each work well with their respective stories. Overall I was mostly surprised how Lorrie Moore was able to create so many different "flavors," especially considering that the second person is a narrative voice that isn't used very often at all.