The Complete Guide to POV

Second person singular present tense

Just as second person has been on the rise, so has present tense.

And the two of them in combination are therefore taken to be the most immediate, the most immersive possible POV.

The question is, do you want a novel to be RIGHT UP IN YOUR STUFF the whole way through?

You now you now you now.

A comparable film would be Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). This was widely seen as something new in screenplay structure. A movie that was entirely third act, entirely action sequence. (Yes, there are lulls — for some gentle torture scenes. But it’s pedal to the metal for two solid hours.)

I loved it, but it’s not all I want to watch.

When slightly more laid back, i.e., not doing flight or violence, the second person singular present tense can give an uncanny sense of direct address to the reader.

That’s what Italo Calvino was going for in the opening chapter of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979).

Not the very beginning, which anticipates an action, and then goes into the imperative:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice — they won’t hear you otherwise — “I’m reading! I don't want to be disturbed!”

Which brings out very clearly how this POV carries an implication very different from its past tense version (see yesterday).

The you in the sentence, ‘You went to the corner shop and got yourself a chocolate bar’ had free will, at the moment they decided to leave their house and buy themselves a treat. The narrative voice is giving an ex post facto version of completed events. This happened.

In the same sentence, but present tense, ‘You go to the corner shop and buy yourself a chocolate bar’, that you is much more of an automata. Moment by moment, you are in a determinist universe. The heavy implication is, You have no choice but to buy a chocolate bar. This has to happen.

As you can anticipate, the future tense is even more oppressively determinist. ‘You will go to the corner shop and buy yourself a chocolate bar.’ Even if you do everything you possibly can to resist, you will go and you will buy. The tone is one of a gangsterish god. This will happen.

Some readers are likely to flee this mind control as soon as they realise they’re going to be stuck in it for a whole story, or novel.

A few paragraphs further on in If on a Winter’s Night, Calvino does the foundational paragraph of you as present moment reader:

You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt the chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it…

This was as much an origin for the popularity of the you-now POV as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) — where we ended yesterday.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again it might not.

Can you see how the compulsive element comes into play straight off? You might not want to be here, on this ride, but you are. You’re going to watch yourself in horrified fascination. It’s a linguistic out-of-body experience. As such, it perfectly fits a character in a time period where self-control is ceasing to be a virtue.

David Foster Wallace’s story ‘Forever Overhead’ (1991) is a mix of orders and observations. This is compulsive prose.

Get out now and go past your parents, who are sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is cause mostly by thinking. Go right by, toward the tank at the deep end. Over the tank is a great iron tower of dirty white. A board protrudes from the top of the tower like a tongue. The pool’s concrete deck is rough and hot against your bleached feet. Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks entirely behind you on the hot stone and disappears.

Theodore Sturgeon’s much earlier story ‘The Man Who Lost the Sea’ (1959) is framed in a speculative way. Given this, then this:

Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

As you can see, there is some flexibility in this POV. But it’s often chosen by writers who are, in one way or another, control freaks. They are boxing the reader in and doing with them what they want. This doesn’t allow for drifty or wondering reading.

See also, You by Caroline Kepnes, and Kate Armstrong’sThe Storyteller. Both make a virtue of this POV’s stalkery vibe.

Please put other examples in the comments, for this and all the other POVs

In summary:

Second person singular present tense.

Likely upsides:

Arresting, direct, propulsive, macho.

Possible downsides

Imprisoning, controlling, inflexible, macho.