THE SECOND-PERSON POINT OF VIEW IN THREE CONTEMPORARY LATINO SHORT STORIES

ABSTRACT The Second-Person Point of View in Three Contemporary Latino Short Stories By Rocio L. Uchofen Advisor: Professor Alyson Bardsley The “you” discourse is dynamic, it generates an interaction, it implies a dialogue between narrator and reader. The investigations about the use of the second person in the narrative discourse generally go beyond English language frontiers, the discussion has not finished and narratological investigations have more texts to analyze as fiction in second-person narration is not an unusual occurrence in contemporary literature. The analysis of three short stories written by Latino writers Daniel Alarcon, Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros intends to find answers to the questions about the nature of second-person narration and the relation between the use of the language and the story itself. The grammatical second person is the one used in a dialogue, the literary use of the “you” narration is not only a curiosity for a unusual point of view but it corresponds to a need to embrace a discourse that is already part of contemporary advertisements, games and other non-literary discourses. The effect is the same, the interaction with the reader is not only an aesthetic choice but implies other levels of interpretation. On the other hand, second-person narration has semantic effects related to the use of speech or way of talking as part of the story’s atmosphere, and the reader’s dialogical experience while approaching the implicit dialogue initiated by the nature of the second-person or “you” discourse