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While reading If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, I felt pulled into the characters’ lives and decisions. The text is written from the second-person point of view. Being addressed as “you” made it a bit harder to separate myself from what the characters are feeling or going through. However, as someone who has not been targeted by racial discrimination, there were moments of more significant distance from the characters’ experiences. Even with this distance, the narrative still allowed me to engage with themes of cultural identity, family expectation, and the challenges of balancing multiple worlds. This also allowed me to reflect on experiences outside of my own.
Describing my Experience
I could understand Trelawny’s identity conflict because he’s constantly being influenced by what other people tell him he’s supposed to be. His sense of identity is shaped by his parents, his environment, and the expectations placed on him, which are not stable or fully his own. I could also understand why both of his parents acted the way they did when it came to cultural background and assimilation. Since Trelawny was born in the United States, his relationship to Jamaican culture is different from theirs. For his parents, their cultural identity is something they brought with them and are trying to hold onto. For Trelawny, that cultural identity is something he is expected to inherit, but doesn’t fully experience in the same way. Because of that, I really could understand why his parents were protective and frustrated when he seemed more “American” and why they placed importance on him being connected to his roots. Meanwhile, I understood why Trelawny struggled so much, as his identity was being shaped by growing up in an entirely different environment than his parents. This definitely put into perspective the complexity of immigrant family dynamics and the pressure to honor your heritage while also forming your own identity.
Defining my Experience
I would definitely describe my experience as empathy. In the experiences glossary, empathy is “The feeling of understanding another person’s actions. You may not condone the actions or identify with the person, but you accept that their actions weren’t wrong.” I didn’t always agree with Trelawny or his parents, but I could understand why they acted the way they did. Even if their reactions were complicated or uncomfortable, I accepted them. Reading Trelawny’s perspective let me understand experiences of cultural dislocation in ways I had never encountered, which helped strengthen my capacity for empathy towards those navigating these experiences.
Features Prompting my Experience
This narrative is told in the second-person point of view, but different chapters are different characters speaking to the audience. The first two examples I used are from when Trelawny is speaking.
In school, when your world geography project is announced and you’re made to choose from a list of countries to present on, you choose Mongolia. It’s not till another student chooses Jamaica that you consider the tiny island a worthy option.
Part of your project requires preparing a dish native to the country you’ve chosen. This is fourth grade. Your mothers do the cooking. When they meet one another on presentation day, eyes ringed dark from having wrestled with foreign recipes late into the night, they nod imperceptibly, too exhausted for pleasantries.
As your classmate begins her presentation on Jamaica, your mother sucks her teeth —a sound akin to industrial-strength Velcro ripping apart drawing glances from several of the other parents. “Me could’ve brought in leftovers,” she whispers, leaning in, “if only you chose home.”
-Escoffery 6
Here, I could recognize why Trelawny didn’t immediately jump to choose Jamaica. He wasn’t born there and he wasn’t super connected to the culture. However, it’s hard to not feel for his mother when she had to put extra work into something that could have showcased her own, and her son’s own, culture. It is entirely understandable why a mother would feel that her culture was overlooked in this moment. I recognize that the use of “you” here was likely meant to make the reader feel complicit in the tension between Trelawny and his mother, but I did not necessarily feel it.
“More and more you’re turning into some kind of Yankee butu,” your father says.
“Don’t blame me ’cause you used me for a green card,” you respond. “I didn’t choose to be born here.” You are grasping more about your position in the world, even if you understand little about what you might do to alter it.
-Escoffery 21
Here, I understood Trelawny’s frustration, as he did not choose to be born in the U.S. and grow up in the culture that he did. It was clear that he felt like he didn’t belong, especially with his father consistently mentioning how “American” he was. In turn, I could understand why his father was frustrated with his American-ness, as he also wanted his son to recognize the importance of being Jamaican.
This quote is from one of Trelawny’s father’s chapters:
Him start walking you inside and telling you how beautiful the baby you make is, but all you can think ’bout is how it good your mummy and daddy never lived to see this. More than that, you think ’bout how you break Sanya’ heart. And about how she make you choose between Delano and Trelawny to take back to the house you finally rebuild and how she say she will never set foot inside that house again. You told her you don’ wan’ take either son from she and she say, You think I go let you walk away from your responsibilities? Like that your plan the whole time. She say, You will take Delano, because me don’ trust you with Trelawny. And you can’ deny you felt small bit of relief.
-Escoffery 62
This moment shows how conflicted Trelawny’s father was. He felt guilty, as he’d cheated on his wife and gotten another woman pregnant, and his thoughts immediately went to guilt when hearing that the baby boy was beautiful. Him feeling “a small bit of relief” about not taking Trelawny was important because it showed how overwhelmed he was. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. The responsibility was so heavy that part of him felt relieved to not have to carry the responsibility of caring for the son both he and his wife didn’t understand. Reading the intimate, unfiltered thoughts of Trelawny’s father made his guilt and relief more tangible. I could really see the heavy burden of parental responsibility and cultural expectation.
Narrative Technology
Part of what prompted this experience was the second-person point of view combined with detailed emotional moments. The use of “you” makes the story feel more immersive and personal. Meanwhile, the emotional complexity forced me to engage with what’s happening instead of just observing it at a distance. Switching between multiple character’s point-of-views while keeping the narration in second person made it impossible to remain uninvolved.
Because of this, I would classify it as an Opportunity to Observe. An Opportunity to Observe is “Constructing a story in which characters display many emotions, perhaps unpredictably, encouraging the viewers or readers to observe and recognize the emotions they are experiencing.” The characters show a range of emotions, sometimes at the same time, like guilt and relief or pride and disappointment. These emotions aren’t directly explained, so I had recognize and interpret them myself. As the story addresses the reader as “you,” I was also reflecting more on my own reactions in real time. There were moments where there was more of a distance, as I have not experienced racial discrimination myself. However, these moments still felt familiar because I have been witness to racial discrimination both in school and the workplace. Regardless, I still was very aware of my own emotions as I read through these moments.
The combination of second-person narration, shifting perspective, and the Opportunity to Observe made the story immersive, enlightening, and enjoyable. Even as someone with dissimilar life experience to Trelawny and his parents, I could confront their struggles and triumphs within the narrative. This definitely helped me identify aspects of the complexities of identity, culture, and family that I didn’t see from my own experience.
Works Cited
Escoffery, Jonathan. If I Survive You. MCD, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.
Experiences Glossary. https://wonder-cat.org/experiences/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026.
Technologies by Element of Narrative. https://wonder-cat.org/technologies. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026
Featured Image
If I Survive You. Jonathan Escoffery. © 2022 by Jonathan Escoffery. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved.
