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Stolpestad by William Lychack
It's the end of your shift and you are about to return home to your family. Then you get a call on the radio, saying you need to help out with a dog. You nag a little, but do your duty and go to see the boy whose dog is severely injured and which obviously needs to be put down. You contemplate your actions, reflect on your past, try to come to terms with what you're about to do. You are going to shoot the dog in the head; the correct method when destroying an animal. But instead, you shoot it in the throat, which doesn't kill it but merely wounds it critically.
This is the story of your life, the main character of the novel by Lychack. Your name is never revealed; instead it makes the reader feel like one is listening to a story about oneself told by a tird-person limited narrator, who does not seem to be a part of one's life, yet is present observing, noting every step, every action, every twitch in one's eye.
This unusual narrating is what makes the story so bizarre. Ordinarily we meet this second-person view only in non-fictional literature or in epistolary novels, but this is neither a self-help book nor a confessional letter; this is a short-story about you who seem uncomfortable in your own life.
To clarify: you is a police officer - potentially named Stolpestad. He has a wife, two sons and a house with a porch; he lives in a town, which is dominated by tenements, mills and traffic lights and where gossip travels fast.
It's the end of your shift and you are about to return home to your family. Then you get a call on the radio, saying you need to help out with a dog. You nag a little, but do your duty and go to see the boy whose dog is severely injured and which obviously needs to be put down. You contemplate your actions, reflect on your past, try to come to terms with what you're about to do. You are going to shoot the dog in the head; the correct method when destroying an animal. But instead, you shoot it in the throat, which doesn't kill it but merely wounds it critically.
This is the story of your life, the main character of the novel by Lychack. Your name is never revealed; instead it makes the reader feel like one is listening to a story about oneself told by a tird-person limited narrator, who does not seem to be a part of one's life, yet is present observing, noting every step, every action, every twitch in one's eye.
This unusual narrating is what makes the story so bizarre. Ordinarily we meet this second-person view only in non-fictional literature or in epistolary novels, but this is neither a self-help book nor a confessional letter; this is a short-story about you who seem uncomfortable in your own life.
To clarify: you is a police officer - potentially named Stolpestad. He has a wife, two sons and a house with a porch; he lives in a town, which is dominated by tenements, mills and traffic lights and where gossip travels fast.