If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

45 mins

Ludmilla hasn’t shown up to meet the Reader at the café. Her lateness becomes so distracting that the Reader can’t focus on the novel. A barista tells him that Ludmilla is calling him. On the phone, she asks the Reader to meet her at her house instead. The Reader goes to the address she provides and enters. Evidently, she lives alone but “something restrains [the Reader] from snooping around” (141). The narrator interrupts to provide more details about the Reader. The Reader is male, the narrator says, which should allow any reader to identify with him. The narrator chooses to leave the Reader nameless, referring to him as “you” because this makes the Reader’s identity more ambiguous. In contrast, the named character Ludmilla is more substantial, though the narrator experiments with referring to her as “you.” The Reader examines her apartment. It’s filled with books. She has modest tastes, apparently cooks regularly, and hides many of her more personal possessions. The narrator returns to his original approach, in which the Reader is the “you” of the audience, and hints that Ludmilla’s many books suggest that she has no man in her life.