I keep seeing reference to 'second person' here, a term I haven't heard before. I thought it was either first or third person.

Can someone explain to me what 'second person' means?

It sounds like, maybe, when the person who is telling the story as 'I' is not the main character like in, for instance, 'The Great Gatsby'.

But I'm probably wrong.

Second person is where 'you' is used instead of 'I', eg:

You know it's going to be a bad day when you take your pack of cigarettes out and discover there's only a mashed up one left, so you have no choice but to go to the corner shop and buy some more, but you know you've only got enough in your pocket for a pint of milk, or a pack of ciggies, so what do you do?

Grammatically second person is just that 'I go' is First, 'you go' is Second, 's/he goes' is Third.

In writing terms, as Naomi says, it's when the story's told as 'you'. But there are two ways that seems to manifest itself. There's 'you' as we all use it, as a colloquial version of what, to be super-correct, would actually be 'one'. A sort of impersonal first-person, only we don't want to start sounding like Prince Charles. Naomi's example (hope I'm right, here, Naomi) is one of those.

But the other sort is when the story really is addressed to a person, by the narrator, who is an implied 'I':

You went to the shop and bought some bread, taking a long time while at home the clock on the mantelpiece ticked on. 'It was raining', you explained when you came back, though your mobile had gone from the hall table. You never used to take it with you for such a short trip, did you? Not since the first few weeks, when you couldn't bear to be separated, said you didn't want to be out of reach, said that you'd never, ever leave.

I can feel an 'I' bursting to get into that example, which is why I think you meet this kind in a short story, usually, or only as one of many voices in a novel - it's terribly difficult to sustain for long.

Thank you, both.

it's terribly difficult to sustain for long

I was thinking as I read your posts, it would be difficult to read for very long!

It reads more like a journalistic style than one suitable for fiction.

A favourite short story of mine - To Esther, by Anne Ritchie - sort-of does it, with a 'you' and an 'I' as well as a handful of other characters, and it's wonderful. But it is a short short story, it has to be said. It's in the Oxf. Book of English Love Stories, ed. Sutherland, if you're interested to track it down.

Emma

The Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone worked brilliantly in second person, because they put the reading in the driving seat, ie "You walk forward into a dark and gloomy cave"

There's also Bright Lights, Big City - a novella by Jay McInerney. The use of 'you' throughout definitely coerces the reader into the narrative.

Also, one of helen Dunmore's but can't think which. Can anyone help? I remember thinking she was doing it for effect because it hadn't really ben done before in a long novel, but she's such a good w riter she got away with it.

It's done in one of Edna O'Brien's too, but again I can't remember which.

Doesn't Winnie the Pooh use first and second person? I'm thinking of the first story, where 'I' is telling the story to his son (Christopher Robin), who is referred to as 'you' throughout ("Silly old bear," you thought, but you were very fond of him etc).

Scholastic have done a teenage book 'Star Crossed' which is a much more sustained second person.