D-503 as a Narrator

I find the narrator’s position in the story to be absolutely fascinating. Zamyatin writes the novel completely in the second person point of view. This is where the character of the story is directly telling us, the audience, the story. What I find to be so fascinating is that I’ve never seen this concept stretched out to longer than a short story. Within the novel D-503 is keeping a journal for work reasons and so that it can go onto his integral and be shipped off into new worlds and civilizations. This allows for the core prose of the novel to change depending on D-503s attitude, his emotional state, and the time when he’s writing his particular entry. Writing in the second person helps for expository reasons. Since D-503 is writing directly to us he can tell us all the pertinent information naturally. He also can add footnotes for clarity like on page 145 where the footnote was obviously written at a much later date than the entry. This allows for us to only see the prose as D-503 instead of Zamyatin in a more immersive way. It pulls us into the narrative and begs us to ask the question about how reliable our narrator is. So that everything that makes this text feel foreign and weird only adds to the story. This makes for the book being a more gripping and immersive read as opposed to if it was just told in the first person point of view.