'You will be drawn in': the literary effectiveness of the second person in Eddie Campbell’s Alec : how to be an artist

Alec: how to be an artist is a graphic novel intertwining autobiography/memoir with the history of the graphic novel itself from the 1980s to the early 2000s. It was written, illustrated and published by the Queensland-based Scot, Eddie Campbell, best known as the illustrator of From hell (written by Alan Moore). This paper seeks to demonstrate that, through a variety of techniques (most notably sustained secondperson narration), the work subverts what structuralist Gérard Genette calls the most fundamental rule of novel writing: that the author must decide to narrate from inside the story via one of the characters (a homodiegetic narration), or from outside (heterodiegetically). Eddie Campbell in an array of forms (author, implied author, commentator and character) is inside and outside this story. He is at times narrator, protagonist and narratee, and at others appears to be a removed (and somewhat bemused) observer, or a powerless agent of fate. At many points the reader too is coopted as protagonist or narratee, thanks to the shape-shifting and unsettling nature of the second-person mode. It will be argued that the use of this unusual narrative mode (with the linked choice of future tense) is not merely a gimmick but a highly effective and appropriate way of telling Campbell’s story.