Y/N

by Esther yi

My daughter, an active girl on the cusp of three years old, draws like a magnet the phrase “Be careful” from her surrounding environs. Grandparents, strangers, even we—her parents, who know better—slip down this slope. Particularly now, during the “I do it on my own” phase, the phrase seem to be forged, just for her, from the limitless depths of the universe itself. The evocation of this spell of protection thuds ineffectually against her for a particular reason: “Be careful” is a spell conjured for the benefit of the speaker, not for the child. With its utterance flies the hope for absolution from a potential future where a small body suffers physical pain that they—the responsible adult—theoretically could have prevented through application of their own worldly wisdom. That nebulous, meaningless cloud, is, therefore, the chief antagonist in my daughter’s life. And like all good hero’s journeys, the antagonist might well be an ally but for the smallest twist of fate.

Y/N, the novel, operates in the liminal space of the plot and page, where narrative hyperreality, book-within framework, and constructive allegory collide. It lives in the beat between being graced with a haphazard “Be careful” and having the speaker finish the injunction, with specificity, clarifying of what one should be careful. You, the reader, are made aware something requires attention but are left to wonder whether it is simply the entire world of which one must be wary.

In thrall to the same lack of specificity that can shade a child’s world in unknowable and constant danger, the book opens with its title: here there are details of a subculture to be gleaned, but if you, like me, are a relative child within the genre, its signifier will land without even signifying that it is a genre’d work:

He’d assumed that Y/N stood for “Yes/No,” believing the slash to signify the protagonist’s fragmented sense of self. When I clarified that it stood for “Your Name,” he grew only more confused.

Seeing an opening chapter where the narrative presence joins a fandom—but not in the way one might expect based on non-fiction representations of music super-group fangirls—it is fair to shift expectation of this book from a social or cultural allegory to a literary response to the metaphysical questions raised by the entire genre of fan fiction:

“Y/N fic puts me to sleep,” he said. “In order to accommodate the biography of every reader that might chance upon the story, the writer creates a character void of personality. But there can be no story without a proper protagonist. So there is never a story when it comes to Y/N. There are only absurd and arbitrary leaps in plot. All of this amounts to a warning, one I urge you to heed…”

The book is a warning: do not speak in aphorism, but in detail. Ride it out to the extreme, “it” being whatever convention or phrase has become so quotidian—“Be careful”—that it has been subsumed into meaningless. Y/N takes the premise of the Y/N avatar–the silent protagonist, the structural reader-insert POV–and accepts the nullity, revels in it. The book fills the role of main character with this void, asking and answering what would happen if emptiness itself–the hunger for satiation, for acceptance; the hunger to be read–was the personality of the protagonist. What does it do to a reader to be both within and without, to be the fulcrum of a story without any actual agency on the page? Y/N fiction is a fiction of self-insert, fiction where the reader’s self is still inserted into the author’s fiction. By making the line between reader and narrator less opaque—you are invited to put your own name into the work—forces you to feel your own impotence with regards to the motion of the plot. Y/N effectively removes the original sin of narrative fiction: which is to deceitfully navigate the reader around the barriers of self without drawing any attention to the fact they always exist. An empty space where a reader is prepared to find a wall catches one unawares and becomes more painful when one crashes against it. Thus, as the reader, you may become the protagonist of Y/N fiction but will always be reminded that it is someone else’s story you are inhabiting. That is the premise and the promise, already, of narrative fiction.

I longed to put my life at the feet of a tremendous conviction, but not for some obvious hugeness, like religion or a political movement. I refused to be drafted into any cause. I wanted a passion so totally mine that no one else could possibly have it. So totally mine that if I didn’t exist, then the passion itself couldn’t exist.

I know little and less of what else is captured within and without the genre of self-insert fan fiction. What I have learned from Y/N is that there is a requirement for a Y/N character to have their own motivations and goals—motivations and goals that end when the story does. But what those goals are–of what a Y/N should “Be careful”–can never be made clear. To create such clarity is to create character, and when that insert becomes an entity unto themselves, the Y/N ceases to allow space for the reader. As the becomes more, the promise of the genre becomes less, only drawing a starker contrast to the fact that despite everything, the one reading a story is still you.