What is particularly interesting in Quilt (2010) by Nicholas Royle narrating the impossible mourning of a man after the death of his beloved father, is its diverse pronominal shifts (it starts as a first-person narrative before becoming a third- then a second-person one), grammatically reflecting the slow disappearance of the first-person protagonist from the narrator’s position and then from the narrative altogether. The clearly-marked ‘you’ passages in Quilt highlight the ghostly presence of a narrator speaking on behalf of a character who is trying to keep it all together but is slowly losing it. The chapter displays that not only does the novel go down the pronominal hierarchy in the switch from first-person to third-person narrative via the second person, but it also stylistically subverts the Animacy Hierarchy through a generic ‘you’ that knits together different pockets of voices in a most experimental way. Royle’s novel is completed by an afterword calling on to the reader in a classical manner, which serves as a transition to Parts III and IV devoted to this (para)textual call to the reader/viewer.

Chapter 9 focuses on paratext from the eighteenth century to Victorian novels, highlighting the revival of omniscience in twenty-first-century storytelling before taking a technological leap to hypertext. Building on theories put forward by specialists of the field, it shows to what extent the notion of ‘interactivity’ and the reader’s higher implication in the creative process in digital fiction as opposed to print fiction need to be narratologically and pragmatically qualified. As the reader is strongly invited to (virtually) perform the action mentioned in the hyperlink by clicking on it if the story is to go on at all, the reference model (of Chapter 1) is tested and adapted to foreground the limits but also the potentialities of digital art. In response to Warhol’s distinction (1986, 1989, 1995) between ‘engaging’ and ‘distancing’ narrators, Chapter 9 also proposes a new model of implication in fiction, taking the perspective of actual readers. Given their degree of engagement and immersion in the narrative addressed to ‘you’, distinctions between ‘engaged’, ‘distanced’ and ‘immersed’ readers are suggested in a flexible model allowing for intermediate positioning.