“That’s right. Bald heads are popping up here and there at the mall and in the facilities maybe even at your own morning meal, when daylight enters at such an angle that the reflection off the clean-shorn pate momentarily casts upon the usually dimmed, cheerless room an illumination that seems generated from within, this lustrous fire. You pause at every sighting, that paleness bobbing across the street, or leaned over the rail of the catwalk above the grow beds, and if you’re close enough, you can’t help but take an extra-long look at the particular scalp and try to read the sheen and textures of that most vulnerable-looking skin, for a clue to why this person has done this to himself. Do they have something in common? Are they nubbier than normal or creased in a similar but distinctive way? Do they appear just that bit transparent so that you’re almost believing you can see the workings of their recusant thoughts? And does it seem that the faces of these people are more unyielding than what the rest of us offer to one another, which is not exactly warmth but rather what you expect in the wordless company of an old friend or cousin, that easy nonchalance?”
The literally device in this passage is the usage of the second-person. The novel is interesting in the way it shifts perspectives, from third-person to first-person to second-person. Chang-Rae Lee changes the point of views in order to paint a full story. The usage of the second-person in this passage succeeds in pulling the reader in to the tale itself before changing to the first-person “we” and then third-person in the subsequent passages. In this passage, Lee utilizes many extremely detailed descriptions of visuals and also movement of the subject. He does not simply write, “you see”, but rather “you pause”. This movement goes further in pulling you into the text rather than simply presenting visuals to a reader, now being specifically addressed, because it gives the reader a sense of agency. It gives them a position to be filling in the passage. In this one, the reader moves through a mall, eats breakfast, and pauses at noticing the bald heads. Lee then goes into a series of questions that the “you”, the reader, is asking themself. This further pulls the reader into the story because Lee does not right like he is posing the question at the reader, but that the reader is posing the question at themself, making them an active member of the book. In later passages, Lee seamlessly transitions to “we”, solidifying the reader as part of the story’s perspective, and then third-person, a bird’s-eye-view of the story. The way in which Lee uses different perspectives is really interesting because a lot of novels either stay solely in the third- or first-perspectives. With very few ever breaching into the second. Using all three within a few pages is a very interesting technique, but especially using the second-perspective in a way that accurately serves a purpose.
