One thing to remember is that when a fictional character is telling a story they can easily slip into the third person narratorial style because they are telling a story inside a story. They could hear the mutated, cat-killing worms screaming for miles. He/she ran out of the apartment and went down to the street. You set fire to the apartment because you can see no other way to stop the worms. We set fire to the apartment and boy did the worms scream. I set fire to the apartment and boy did the worms scream. To briefly recap our point of view signpost words: Third person is the heavy duty workhorse of fiction, capable of running the gamut from god-like omniscience to sparse, objective prose that describes only what is physically happening in a scene without comment, like stage notes for a play. Third person narratives are told by the author and utilize he/she/they when referring to characters. I think there’s some untapped potential in the indirect “you”, something philosophic about it, and the direct “you” can be used to great comic effect, but you won’t be finding me grinding out an entire novel in the second person. Second person can be fun to play with in short doses, though, and there are some interesting modern and post-modern things you can do with it if you’re so inclined. Second person can be jarring to the reader, who when initially addressed may instantly think to themselves, “Who the hell do you think you are, telling me what I’m doing?” and even when second person is well-executed it tends to wear the reader down, since they’re not only fighting to suspend their normal I’m-reading-fiction-but-it’s-true sense of disbelief but a second layer of disbelief on top of that (the writer can’t really be addressing me personally-he doesn’t even know me!). Second person isn’t nearly as popular in fiction as first or third person and has traditionally been more prevalent in the self-help and choose your own adventure writing genres. The “you” in indirect second person is more a generalized, much vaguer “you” than you the reader. An indirect second person address is more in line with a sentence like “You never know how tough worms are until they start attacking” or “You’d think Sir FuzzyFace could outrun some crawling worms but I guess he was too out of shape…”. This astonishing slice of prose is an example of a direct second person POV, as in the narrator is addressing the reader directly. They have also eaten your cat, Sir FuzzyFace. They have mutated far, far beyond the ability of any hardware store chemical to hurt them. When you sprinkle the worm killer compound upon the worms they chuckle merrily. You buy worm killer from the clerk and then you return home. In the second person POV the author addresses the reader as “you”, suggesting that the reader themselves is a character in the story. (I recently wrote a book on writing call The Glorious Grind: Meditations on Crafting Fiction & The Writing Life and have decided to simply publish it in installments here.) I would easily consider this book the equal of Oppegaard’s much-heralded The Suicide Collectors. Every character felt real and consistent, Mack especially so. He inhabits the weirdly insular world we all did as teenagers, and even if we didn’t all turn arsonist, there’s plenty to identify with.Īlthough the book’s climax was inevitable, the path there (and the actual concluding circumstances) were unexpected and deeply satisfying. Mack is a marvelous narrator, full of humor and self-awareness and insight despite his many flaws. The Firebug of Balrog County burns hot and fast, gazing into the heart of a tragic moment and the odd ways in which we confront it. But when his latest act of arson attracts unexpected attention, Mack finds himself in a curious game of cat and mouse with the law and the firebug within. As the firebug inside him grows hungrier and more ambitious, Mack deals with the trials of high school, his devastated sister and father, and his infatuation with a strange college girl named Katrina. When his mother dies from cancer, Mack Druneswald tries to ease the pain by setting fires around his small town.
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