Restorative and Traumatic Interpellations: The Second-Person Address in Salinger's Works

At the beginning of J. D. Salinger's "Seymour: An Introduction," Buddy, the narrator, addresses his readers and says: "Please, dear general reader, as a last indulgence (if you're still here), reread those two short passages from Kafka and Kierkegaard I started out with" (Raise High the Roof Beam 105). The address to the reader is intended to persuade her to devote herself to the narrator's story and allow him to guide her through the reading process, obeying his reading instructions. This address is both "estranging" and "bonding" (to use James Phelan's [2007] terms for unreliability), as the term "general reader" is not an intimate one, but the address itself has a bonding and reviving effect on the addressee. The term "general reader" reminds us that the author–reader relationship is based on a kind of 'blind trust' because, while writing, the author has no idea who his reader is and whether she can be trusted. Nevertheless, he trusts her enough to ask her, using the mediation of the narrator, to read in a certain non-conventional order. In the process, the narrator presents himself as the author of the text, thus blurring the distinction between himself and the real author of the book, J. D. Salinger. The author, as part of his communication with actual readers, designs the narrator–narratee relationship using the direct address to create a space for the actual reader to enter and become an integral part of the literary text. While this practice can be dismissed as a literary convention, it can also be seen as a personal invitation to entrust ourselves to the narrator and dive into the story.

In what follows, I will focus on the ways in which Salinger's fiction invites readers to enter the literary text by addressing them. Since literature always addresses readers and is an act of communication, the question of the address as a form lies at its heart. The address to the reader can be direct, indicating that the reader is the recipient, as is the case in Salinger's aforementioned quote; or it can circumvent the reader, using a general 'you,' as is the case at the opening of Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: "If you really want to hear about it" (1). In both cases, the reader interprets this utterance as a personal address, since the second person always points to a listener, as Émile Benveniste suggests (226).

From a grammatical standpoint, texts written in the second person are particularly fit for public reading. In this context, the 'you' can be assigned a specific meaning. It is much easier to understand addresses to a theater audience (for example, the addresses in the play Offending the Audience by Peter Handke) or to an audience in a poetry-reading event than addresses in a novel. In the case of prose fiction, which is traditionally read in silence, the instability of second-person pronouns is particularly evident.¹ In these cases the address is always double. On the one hand, readers recognize that it is not personal since the work was not written for them specifically; but on the other, they often feel that they were the work's ideal reader.² The address is to the fictitious reader within the text and to the actual reader outside it (Fludernik 286; Phelan, "Narratee" 144; Richardson 6).

In focusing on the second person, I seek to discuss reading as a process of subjectivation, the reader's complex response to the author's address that results in the reader inhabiting a certain subject position. My interest lies in narratives that use second-person pronouns in a way that allows the reader to identify with the addressee and hence to hold on to her subject position throughout much of the text. This approach considers the ability of both the actual and implied readers to adopt the role of the narratee ("someone whom the narrator addresses," according to Gerald Prince 7). In other words, at the heart of this study are the gaps between the narratee, the reader...