Romo: Still Master of the Second-Person Narrative
By Matt Cordon (kh). Filed in Misc. |
Wikipedia describes a second-person narrative as follows:
Second-person narration is a narrative technique in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun “you”.
This brings us to our friend Romo, who somewhat famously escorted Carrie Underwood to the Country Music Awards earlier this week. According to a story in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
The moment all his teammates wanted to talk about was Underwood giving Romo her purse when she accepted an award.
“You have to help out when you can,” Romo said with a smile.
“I am just a secondary protocol there. I am there to do a job and it was to hold the purse. Anytime you do stuff like that you are going to take a ribbing. It goes with the job.”
Enough about the Underwood mess, but if there were ever a masterful use of the second-person narrative, that would have to be it. I mean, deflecting a comment about holding his date’s purse by shifting seamlessly to the second-person point of view? Any time you see or hear something like that, you have to admire the guy.
