In narratology, the grammatical category of person remains to be studied from the perspective of the reader. This article focuses on a particular type of first-person narrative, a type of " interior monologue " in the present tense, via Arthur Schnitzler's short stories Leutnant Gustl (1901) and Fräulein Else (1924). This type of monologue denies the reader's existence within the text (the reader is un-ratified, a reader-voyeur) yet forces the participation of the real reader (who becomes a reader-actor, the only vehicle that brings the silent " voice " of the protagonist to life). I propose to replace the notion of " cooperative reader " (Eco 1979) by that of " unratified/complicit reader ". The simulated immediacy of the deictic I functions as a powerful conveyor of projection and identification of the reader with the protagonist.