The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point of view you are warned not even to try, because it is nearly impossible to make it work, but every writer at some point tries anyway. Well, Calvino pulls it off. How?
The knock against second person is that the writer doesn’t know anything about the reader, so how can the writer pretend to know how the reader would think or feel any of things that the writer assigns to the second person character. In this case the bridge is made by identifying with the reader as a reader and nothing else, simply someone who is beginning to read a Italo Calvino’s book, If on a winter’s night a traveler.