Person on the Page

As a memoirist or personal essay writer, one of your goals may be to elicit empathy from your readers. Perhaps you want readers to understand your perspective on an experience. Or you hope that readers will sympathize with you as the teller of your story. In other words, you may want readers to put themselves in your place. Inspiring empathy is an important means of engaging readers, but it is also a valuable method for promoting understanding of diverse identities and tolerance for difference among human beings.

In an article written for Cultural Studies ßà Cultural Methodologies, sociologist Kurt Borchard examines what he defines as his “partial Jewish identity.” To do so, he experiments with writing an account of his identity development from a second-person point of view. His purpose in this experiment is to create audience empathy, to encourage self-reflection among his readers, and to invite readers to question their own sense of identity in relation to others.

In his essay, Borchard recounts growing up with a father who was half Jewish, half Catholic.  He expresses his ambivalence about his identity as a partial Jew. When he takes a position as a professor at a midwestern university where, as he points out, more of his students’ ancestors include Holocaust perpetrators than Holocaust victims, he first avoids revealing his Jewish identity. Finally, though, he shares the fact that he is Jewish with the university community. As he tells his story, he addresses readers as you and places them in his role in the narrative.

Borchard’s story is interesting as an account of one person’s struggle with what he perceives as a multiple-category identity.  But it is also useful to writers of personal narratives because a careful reading reveals that when a personal account is told from second-person point of view, the you at the center of the narrative (which replaces the standard pronoun I) can function in several ways.

1.  Second-person address of the reader serves to create characterization or stage direction as the reader assumes the role of the narrator.

The first sentence of Borchard’s essay is, “Your father’s father was Jewish and your father’s mother was Catholic.” Such a sentence prompts the reader to assume a character, to imagine being a person with a particular heritage.  Later Borchard writes, “You are a kid, sitting in [your father’s] store.” This kind of sentence asks the reader to imagine being in a specific setting, occupying the space of the narrator. In a later section of the essay, he writes, “You try to decipher German documents indicating [your father] was baptized Catholic, documents with Nazi-era stamps featuring an eagle atop a swastika.” In this case, the narrator directs the reader, who is by now an actor in the unfolding drama, to do something, to behave in a certain way. In all of these cases, readers are encouraged to imagine themselves as the narrator, to go where he goes, to see what he sees.

2. Second-person point of view can be used to prompt the reader to think critically about the narrator’s experience.

Throughout his narrative, Borchard directs questions to the reader, such as, “Do you want to see yourself as a descendent of an historical underdog?” and “Your dad is an outsider. Are you? How so?” Such questions mark a shift from stage direction to the narrator’s direct address of the reader. The narrator challenges the reader to consider the situation of being a partial Jew now that the reader has assumed that role. By doing so, the narrator invites the reader to empathize with his perceived position within his world.

3. The you of second-person address can be used as a synonym for everyone.

In his essay, Borchard asks, “How many kids of immigrants go through this self-conscious rite of passage, hyper aware of your foreign-seeming parent?” In this case, the word your in the question refers not just to the reader but to everyone who is a child of immigrants. It operates as a universal referent in the same way that the words you and your operate in sentences such as, “You should maintain a healthy diet” or “Exercise is good for your heart.”

4.  The use of you may function uniquely within third-person narration.

Borchard recalls his visit to Israel, when he is encouraged to pray with a group of Holocaust survivors. He writes, “At one point you whisper to the tour leader, an eighty-year-old Auschwitz survivor, you are not Jewish. He looks you in the eye and says, you are now” [my italics]. As Borchard states the Auschwitz survivor’s comment, the point of view shifts from second to third person, making of the comment a line of dialogue in the drama. Within the context of Borchard’s narrative, the survivor speaks both to the narrator and to the reader who has assumed to the narrator’s role. This use of you within an otherwise third-person narration emphasizes the unity that Borchard has cultivated between narrator and reader.  

Borchard’s article is titled “An Experiment in Second Person Writing: Notes on a Partial Jewish Identity.” In it he examines how social and political categories of identity contain interstitial spaces where partial or otherwise uncategorized identities may exert their presence. His experiment with telling his story from second-person point of view illustrates how awareness of diversity and empathy for social others may be cultivated through personal writing. 

His experiment provides us with an illustration of the effects of second-person point of view in personal writing.

If you want to elicit empathy in your reader, try writing your story in second person.

For more on second-person point of view in personal writing, see my earlier post Point of View, Times Two.