Bright Lights, Big City Techniques

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Bright Lights, Big City is its second person narrative format. Unlike the first-person narrators of more conventional novels, the central character relates his lively adventures by starting each sentence with "you" rather than "I" and remains anonymous throughout the novel. Mclnerney once admitted that he was uncertain of whether he could effectively maintain the technique throughout such a long tale. The novel had, in fact, started as a short story, which eventually became the novel's first chapter, and had then spontaneously grown. When...

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