A Study on the Second-Person Narrative in Jennifer Egan’s Black Box

Baoyu Nie^*

School of Foreign Studies, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, China.

DOI: 10.4236/jss.2015.310008                

Abstract

Notable for the second-person Twitter narrative, Jennifer Egan’s 2012 short science fiction Black Box is one of the most triumphant and fully-fledged fictions written in the form of new media. This paper mainly explores the second-person narrative employed in Black Box, pointing out that the second-person narrative leads the reader to participate in the story, allowing the reader to sense the same feelings as the protagonist does. From the second person’s perspective, Egan expresses her concerns and worries about the security of the American security as well as the whole world in the post-”9·11” period and at the same time she embraces the virtues and pleasures of traditional storytelling delivered through a wholly new digital format. This paper concludes that Black Box is perhaps one of the boldest experiments of narrative form and it is a direct exploration into the contemporary image culture.

Keywords

Jennifer Egan, Black Box, Second-Person Narrative, Image Culture

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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