A third important area of narrative

A third important area of narrative theory that is immediately relevant to second-person fiction is the relation between the narratee (and "you” protagonist) and the implied reader or real reader (depending on the kind of narrative model one uses). This issue is the major question discussed in James Phelan's paper below. The intricate and ambiguous involvement strategies for which second- person fiction is so notable have received ample discussion in most treatments of second-person narrative, but their crucial theoretical implications for a model of narrative communication are rarely noted. The rather fluid merging between the roles of the extradiegetic narratee with whom a reader may or may not want to identify, the implied reader (with whom one expects the actual reader to identify) and the real reader has been noted most impressively by Goetsch in his analysis of concretely visualized reader figures (intra- and extradiegetic nar- ratees) in a large corpus of German and English novels. It is important, however, to put these issues in perspective by specifying what kind of communicational model one wants to utilize for narrative. In particular, the status of the implied narratee has recently come under considerable pressure from the theoretical perspective mostly in the wake of the recent attack on the category of the implied