Second person narrative is known to be the most difficult of all of three perspective to employ in literature. As a narrator, I can tell a story of someone else and I can surely tell a story about myself. But, to tell the reader something about themselves is certainly a difficult task to attempt. Jamaica Kincaid does just this in the first section of “A Small Place” and does so with purpose.

She begins with a hypothetical proposition: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see” (Kincaid, 3). Here, Kincaid makes no assumptions about the reader but merely tells the reader about what they will see as a tourist. As she continues however, she starts to make some bold assumptions about the reader: “Since you are a tourist, a North American or European—to be frank, white”(Kincaid, 4). But how can Kincaid know this about the reader? As the narration is third-person, surely she does not know what kind of tourists we are! She continues later on even more aggressively: “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being.” (Kincaid, 14). And, with this quote, we can understand the impact of Kincaid’s choice of second-person narrative. If this was written in the third-person, we can understand that the tourist of interest is an ugly human being, but surely not us! But, by writing in the second-person, Kincaid is telling us that, if we are tourists, we are ugly human beings. It’s a personal call to self-reflection only attainable by her masterful use of point-of-view.