4. Immersion through experientialit

4. Immersion through experientiality and identificationLet us now return to Fludernik’s suggestion that the second-person address may be more effective (i.e. more engaging) if the you-narrative is presented in the reflectoral mode. Furthermore, identification with the you-protagonist is said to be especially likely if our experiences or circumstances resemble those of the protagonist. The question of identi- fication is a tricky one because it is difficult to validateprecisely how and to which extent readers may or may not identify with fictional characters. Miall (2015: 184), for exam- ple, points out ‘that readers’ experience of empathy and other feelings is modified as consciousness intervenes, and that at times feelings elaborate into a representation of the underlying issues of the text’ in empirical studies where readers are asked about their emotional responses to texts.Unsurprisingly, as we already saw, scholars disagree on the importance of an overlap or similarities between readers and characters: Phelan (1994), for example, argues that the more specificity is added to the description of a character in a given storyworld the more distanced readers will feel from the you referent position; by contrast, Kacandes argues the opposite by effectively saying that specificity does not diminish the address pronoun’s rhetorical sway over readers. Bonheim (1983: 73) additionally addresses the question of fictionality when he argues: ‘If the fictive “you” is not present physically in the story in an obvious way, the reader may not recognize his fictive status and mistak- enly think himself to be addressed.’If we factor in immersion through experientiality we arrive at an impasse because greater experientiality (e.g. by means of the reflectoral mode or internal focalization) seems to demand specificity as a prerequisite. As mentioned above, the problem arises because discussions ofyou-narration at this point conflate two distinct aspects, namely, whether we feel addressed by the you in the text on the one hand, and whether we become emotionally involved in the presented actions on the other. It is obvious that we can immerse ourselves to a certain degree in stories which do not make use of second-person narration. The more difficult question is whether we can feel addressed by the second- person pronoun and still remain detached or uninvolved.