"The Quiet American, Or How to Be a Good Guest" by Erika Dreifus comes from her debut story collection, Quiet Americans (Last Light Studio, 2011). It's one of seven stories and it jumped out at me as I flipped through the book as it opens:
You will go to Germany.
That's right, it's told in second person, which I always find interesting. I think part of the reason I do is that it's not used that often, and to be very honest, I'm not really sure what the reasoning typically is for using it. As in, if there's an explanation that you'd hear from an English professor--"Oh, second person is what you want to use if ...", I have no idea what that explanation would be.
The story is told by a young, American Jew. Based on a note that she visited Europe when she was younger with her parents and sister, and this is 22 years later, I'd guess her age would be late twenties to early thirties. She's been to Europe before, but not Germany. As she's poor with directions, her parents suggested she take a tour of the city (Stuttgart) before actually wandering around on her own--she takes the advice.
Dreifus lets the reader into the narrator's mind early on as she talks over the idea of her trip with her best friend and wonders "...which is worse, at this point. To be an American in Europe--or to be a Jew."
Fairly quickly on the tour, Dreifus introduces an even more cental issue of conflict--the tour guide speaking in revolving German and then English, whose tone allows a possibly paranoid narrator to believe that the tour guide is complaining to, or blaming, those listening in English a bit too much over the need to replace a building or two due to the bombing of Stuttgart. As the narrator has been told she acts paranoid at times, she's got it in her head that maybe she's hearing things a bit wrong. In the end, another English speaking tourist, a former RAF member, speaks his own mind, allowing the narrator to remain the quiet American.
I decided at some point reading the story that Dreifus opted to use the second person narration as the character truly seemed to still be trying to figure things out to some degree, herself. That she was really telling herself the story again, the one she'd lived through, in order to get it to make more sense to herself. This made the choice seem to be a very good one, and I found myself thinking that Dreifus did a really nice job of getting the reader into her story, introducing the conflict and coming to a resolution.
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