Reading as a Writer: Lorrie Moore

In “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” Lorrie Moore uses a complicated form of the second person to create her protagonist. The first way in which it is unique is how she delivers any sentence involving action of the protagonist in the form of a mandate. For example, when describing the protagonist’s actions, she says “Show him how one of the drawers is off its runner. Show him how to pull it out just so far” (149). Normal second person narration would have written this as “You show him how one of the drawers is off its runner. You show him how to pull it out just so far.” The diction of mandates gives the impression of something of a recipe. It also eliminates the necessity of choice or reflection on what must be done. The protagonist, we learn, is a woman who feels disconnected from her boyfriend and cannot figure out how to fix things. By delivering the action of the story to the reader in the form of second person mandates, Moore helps the reader feel some of the protagonist’s desperation: she is going down a track, this is what must be done by her and by whoever is listening.

Second person narration generally is used with a level of impersonality regarding the character referred to as “you.” If the you is to be universal and help the reader fall right into the story as a character, then they generally retain a small degree of anonymity. Lorrie, however, violates this standard. The “you” that she uses has a name, Trudy, and is a very distinct person. If the story had been written in third person, the character would feel just as distinct and separate from the reader, but it would lose the trapped voice of Trudy. If Moore had written the story in first person, that would imply that Trudy was taking a much higher level of accountability and responsibility of this story. A first person narrator really owns the setting around them and what’s happening, has a real stake in the outcome of affairs. Trudy, however, feels helpless. The extremely personal and characterized and even named second person helps feed the reader the complicated emotions that Trudy is feeling.

To make things even more interesting, Moore also wrote the story in the form of a journal or diary. This heightens how personal the story is to Trudy specifically, despite the second person narrator. It also forces the reader to grapple with the second person on another level, too. Journals are typically written in the first person and describe things that happened to the writer. Instead, what Moore is doing is having a character write about her own life in such a personal avenue but leave herself out of it. The overall effect created by all of these intersecting elements of narrative style is one of isolation and entrapment.