Abstract This paper examines the penetrative use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ in thought presentation, with special focus on Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023). While the use of ‘you’ has been widely studied in spoken narratives and second-person fiction, this study explores its functions particularly in character thought presentation. Drawing on Sorlin’s (2022) six-point reference model, it demonstrates how ‘you’ in Orbital functions in three key ways: as self-address, as apostrophic address to absent others, and as a collective pronoun encompassing the crew. These uses are inherently ambiguous, shifting between specificity and generality, and they enable the narrative to bridge the astronauts’ physical reality to their emotional ties to Earth. In doing so, ‘you’ reveals both individual and collective subjectivity, inviting readers into a shared perspective that emphasizes interconnection and vulnerability.
Abstract This article aims to take an interesting theoretical issue – namely diversity of interpretation and its thematization in metahermeneutics – as a point of departure for an innovative exercise on interpreting narratives in professional contexts as well as in the classroom. We build on Liesbeth Korthals Altes’s idea that readers attribute an ethos (of, for example, sincerity, reliability, authority, or irony) to characters, narrators, and authors, and try to make it more specific in two ways. First, we argue that ethos attributions depend upon the psychological and emotional predispositions that readers bring to the narrative through prior experiences, but also their specific positionality. Theoretical concepts that are useful in this context are Marco Caracciolo’s notion of the experiential background and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional categories, both of which differ from reader to reader. Second, we argue that individual narrative techniques in the text must also be considered if we want to understand how readers construct the meaning of a given narrative. In other words, readers do not only attribute an ethos (i.e., values, beliefs, or world views) to characters, narrators, and authors but also to narrative techniques such as paratextual features, intertextual references, the plot development, or aspects of the storyworld. We offer the categories of retrospective relations , prospective relations , and speculative relations as features of the relatability of the experiences rendered through narratives. The individual realizations of experiential relatability are an important factor for explaining the reasons behind different interpretations of texts. The article also contains a qualitative case study, which involves a discussion of different interpretations against the foil of experiential backgrounds and intersectional identity categories, as an example of the kind of metahermeneutic exercise we have in mind.
