Essay Questions

What is unusual about the narration of this novel?

The novel is related through the use of second-person perspective in which the reader is implicated as the protagonist through the reference point of the pronoun “you” which commences with the book’s opening line: “You were at a party when your father died – and immediately you were told, a miracle happened.” While this narrative perspective remains unusual, it perhaps no longer quite qualifies as actually being rare. The most well-known example probably still remains Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City even though what was already overrated at the time has since become painfully dated. A different sort of take on this model is the Dr. Suess book Oh, the Places You’ll Go.

In recent decades, the use of second-person narration has tended to be incorporated into a more comprehensively postmodern fracturing of narrative perspectives in which only certain parts of the novel are told this way while others adopt more convention first or third person perspectives. Among the high profile novels fitting this structure to varying degrees are Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. The Sound of My Voice does remain among the very short list of novels narrated entirely in the second person.

In what significant way does this novel violate what is often thought to be a cardinal rule of using second-person narration?

If you watch the film adaptation of Bright Lights, Big City you will hear the character that is the book’s narrator being referred to as Jamie Conway. In the book, however, he is never identified by name. One of the conventions that is usually attached to any decision to write using second-person perspective is that the narrator will be as anonymous and featureless as possible. In other words, not only will the narrator remain unnamed, but there will be an absolute minimum of person description. This purpose, of course, is to increase the reader’s identification with the narrator because, obviously, the entire reason for this specific and unusual choice is to increase and enhance the ability of the reader to identify with the narrator. This novel violates that expectation by providing a narrator with not only a name—Morris Magellan—but very definitely delineated characteristics that would seemingly increase the difficulty of readers identifying with him.

So, what’s the point of the narrative device here?

Since the author made the very calculated decision to make Morris Magellan a much more fully rounded and developed character than is usual for second-person narrators, the question inevitably arises: why not just have Morris tell his story in the more traditional way? It becomes fairly obvious quite early in the narrative that this is really just a first-person narrative account being conveyed in the second-person and for a good chunk of the novel many readers may well be wondering why bother? Is there a point or it is just some gimmick to make the novel stand out from the pack? An argument can be certainly be made in support of the latter, but there is fully validated secondary convention for engaging second-person.

While most authors choose to use it in order to bring the reader deeper into the story and intensify that effect by creating a featureless narrator, other authors use it specifically when writing about distinctly unpleasant characters whose actions, thoughts, behaviors are not necessarily universal. For instance, second-person would be a very valid choice for from a serial killer’s point of view. Morris is certainly does not deviate that far from the norm, but he is definitely not a character particularly inviting for identification. By adopting the second-person, the rather distasteful and unsavory aspects of the protagonist is subtly shifted onto the reader in a way that makes better facilitates such identification.