Second Person Narration And Narrative Communication

The discussion about the personal pronoun in western narratology has been going on for a long time. Narratologists preferred to discuss the more extensive and more complicated point of view, and neglected the personal pronouns in the studies of narratives. But it is an inevitable topic that every narratologist would never miss. And in fact the narrative perspective and the personal concerned are two topics which are related to each other.If we subdivide the study of personal pronoun into three subcategories, we'll find a fact that there is an apparent imbalance in most scholars'researches, for example some narratologists usually pay more attention not to second-person narration, but to first-person and third-person narration. They also have accumulated more research results on the latter. According to literature materials, we find the study of"second-person narration"in the West is very early and nearly started together with the growth and the establishment of narratology as an independent discipline. The reason for this may be that"you"is a pronoun that is hard to be controlled in practice. So writers prefer to use"I"and"he"or"she".In the context above, the present thesis will try to find what"second-person narration"is. The research should be done within the field of person, namely, the study of first-person narration and third-person narration should be the context of discussing second-person narration, as it is not precise and unscientific that only talking about second-person. Narratology have experienced a circuitous process: from prosperity to decline in1980s and then from declination to renaissance in 1990s. Now, as a result of widely absorbing new methods and new thoughts, narratology has been extremely sophisticated. Inspired by the way of renaissance of narratology, the thesis based on the"rhetorical theory of narrative", and borrowed ideas from Linguistics, Semiotics and Reception Aesthetics- Reader-Response Criticism, and then rigorously, closely studied double deixis, intrinsic dialogism of"you", the character of being narrative apostrophe of"you", and the point of view, the sentence pattern and the tense of"you".Based on the discussions above, the thesis draws a conclusion as follow: comparing with "I"and"he/she","you"is the most unstable and most vague personal pronoun. It can play three roles in the text: narrator, character and narratee. And it also has the strong trend of pointing to readers out of the text. It establishes the narrative communication between author and reader, between implied author and implied reader, and between narrator and narratee. Communication is the final object of narrative, how to narrating is a kind of rhetoric, and rhetoric has relation with effect, so"second-person narration"itself is a rhetorical act, it opens the communication which carries the most plenty of information, and the effect of narrating by"you"is better than narrating by"I"and"he/she".Without writing practices, every criticism and theoretical study can not be done exactly. This point is not only what our thesis wants to explain, but also what our thesis strives to fulfill. Soul Mountain and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler are suitable for comparative study. There are two reasons. One is they are both masterpieces in their own language systems and they are typical; the other is they are just counterparts in the pole of second-person narration, that is to say, one is the"dialogic pole"and the other is the"apostrophic pole". The author put studies of them in an independent chapter so as to make the more complete discussion.