From the opening of Mark Richard's House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home:
It had been a long time since I'd read a book in a single day, but Richard's (pronounced Ri-SHARD) memoir grabbed me and refused to let go. It's beautifully written in many ways, but what gives it its narrative power is the unusual use of second person. Instead of I, Richard uses you, a risky choice made famous by Jay McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City. In the paragraph above, he turns the opening into a cadenced set of orders, almost military in tone. Though not literally directed at the readers, they nevertheless compel our attention.
Most of the narration isn't in the imperative mode, but the hypnotic effect of the repeated you is always present:
"You are lost at sea in New York City, headphones on, Bible tract in your back pocket, the seafaring novel roaring in your head, the heaving concrete, headlong black foaming ocean, a pitched deck where men hold on for life in the shadows, a Master somewhere on the upper deck, unseen but seeing, seeing you, no urgency, no destination, no end to the night, you sail under reefed sail, a stranger pulls you by your collar from stepping in front of an express bus on Fifty-seventh Street."
This sentence, with its piled-up, rhythmic phrases and its stream-of-conscious immediacy, doesn't need second person to be powerful. It would work well with the more conventional I or he. But all those you's reach out for us. We become the subject of the story. And when you're watching a life you never knew you had unfold on the pages you hold in your hands, you find it hard to walk away.