In the outer one, Boccaccio speaks to the reader directly.
The voices began to take over the book and to speak to the reader over the biographer's head.
Titles are so often missed, and I think they're a wonderful opportunity to speak to the reader.
Others had discovered a narrator who was, as one account had it, "pathologically honest" when speaking to the reader.
They speak to the reader directly: this is a conversation with a likable next-door neighbor rather than a scary visitation from a bipolar goddess.
I needed the book to speak to the reader as a medium would, and to give some impression of how a stranger can tell you about yourself at least fairly fluently without actually knowing anything — that demanded the second person.
Hence its greater gaiety and ease of contrivance, its (on the whole) superior finish, and its flattering air of speaking to the reader who, himself presumably educated, may be spared the obvious.
Like many Thompson novels "The Killer Inside Me" is told in the first person, and the reader eventually discovers that Lou is himself dead: he's speaking to the reader from beyond the grave, as it were, and his narrative voice is as seductive and elusive as the one he uses to sweet-talk his victims.
He wisely refrains from mimicking Dickens's style, writing in Catherine's voice (which reaches us, strangely, from beyond the grave); she speaks to the reader as if to a diary, and her account is given to poignant repetition and occasional verse.
The style the book is written in is very interesting as it is written from the young slave's point of view, and she tells everything as if she is speaking to the reader, and it's in her own particular way of talking.
But Binet does not seem aware that this trick of giving the impression that he is thinking the book through as he is writing it is one of the oldest tricks of novelistic verisimilitude: it is inseparable from the fraudulence of the first-person narrator, who is pretending to be speaking to the reader off the cuff even as the novel has been rewritten a thousand times by the laboring author.
