2 + 2 + 2 = 7

I was reading this collection of stories of Lydia Davis - Ten Stories from Flaubert. I'm not a subscriber but as a free user I could read the first three. All of them are connected in some way. I was done reading the three stories once that I felt I had to read them over once again. But the best part was different use of tense and person in each of the stories.

                 At first second person narrative never seemed natural to me. It was year and a half back in Creative Writing course that I came across more pieces of second person writing and understood some aspects of it. I often use the example of play and a person in the audience to explain the novelty of second person. Imagine there is a play and you are part of the audience. You connect with a character and feel his emotions and understand his actions. Now imagine there is a soliloquy where the character in question talks about his feelings but addresses you while talking about them. As if he's telling you about your own feelings. That's the kind of effect second person lends to a narrative. Often in situations where a character finds himself in an unexpected situation, using second person adds a layer to the narrative. However, it should come at the price of jostling between two persons and effectively confusing the reader. Needless to say, second person narrative was what I used in my final non-fiction writing piece.

               Now, the first story (After You Left) was a strange story as the author mixed second as well as first person. The author is known for mixing and mashing things and coming with new techniques. However, reading it was strange and the first thing that came to my mind was if it's even allowed. Ok, now we are all masters of our own will and write what we wish. Actually, "allowed" is one word that is hard to find in this field. But still. And then four or five sentences later, one begins to realize that it might actually not be one of those second person narrative kind of pieces. It's a simple beginning of a story involving two people where one character (I) reminds another character (you) how the latter wanted to know what happened to the former. OK, now everything is sorted.

          But then how does a reader not fall into the trap of getting confused and not be misled into believing that it was a second person kind of narrative. To know if mixing of first and second person was a good enough clue, I checked to see if there were examples on net demonstrating otherwise. Turns out, I found a lot of pieces mixing first and third person but not second person mixed with first or third. So it is a good enough clue to tell us something is off. But personally I feel it's the spacing and ending of the paragraph with one line in a hint in itself. Signalling that something is different and what you understood from the first paragraph needs to be pondered upon and carried over to the subsequent paragraphs. The fact is it is implicit and the best part is it was never concretely put before us. It was yet another day for our head to take stock of what is given and come with an inference with a lot more information than what it got. In a way, you are giving 2 apples, 2 mangoes, 2 bananas and getting 7 fruits in all. I'd like to think of that extra fruit just as an incentive. What do you think?