This paper presents a correlation between second-person narration and the more-than
-human perspectivity in animal narratives. The analysis focuses on representations of “you”
narration in Andrzej Zaniewski’s novel Rat, published for the first time in 1995. “Rat-centric”
fiction, as Marco Caracciolo describes it, talks about various experiences of the title animal.
Although the dominant diegetic form in the novel is the first-person narrative, the appearing
parts of the text told from a second-person point of view turn out to be a significant element
of a non-anthropocentric perspective. Considering the influence of form on the posthuman
message, the paper is based on research in the field of animal studies and contemporary narratology,
including, among others, Irene Kacandes’s “literary performative”, David Herman’s
“double deixis” or Dominique Lestel’s “thinking with fur”. In this article, I propose to distinguish
three functions of the second-person narrative in Rat: immersive, empathetic and
identity roles. The immersive function participates in adapting a sensorimotor repertoire to
the intersubjective perception of the non-human world. The second of them, the empathetic
function, by bonding the human narratee with the animal character, opens a possibility of
embodied co-experience and verification of anthropocentric norms. The third, identity function,
participates in (de)constructing the rat selfhood. Findings of the proposed perspective
of second-person zoonarration sheds new light on its formal opportunities for creating posthuman
agency, thinking, and storytelling