If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

From the novel’s opening sentence, the narrator of If on a winter’s night a traveler explicitly draws the audience’s attention to the act of reading. The novel exemplifies metafiction, in which a novel’s narration is self-aware. The narrator knows he’s directly addressing the novel’s audience, and the story starts and ends with a declaration of the audience starting and ending the novel. Unusually for fiction, the narrator makes the audience aware of their role in the novel by using a second-person singular pronoun. The Reader is the novel’s protagonist; the Reader is the audience, addressed as “you” throughout the text. Even in this sense, however, the novel creates an abstract blur between metafiction and traditional fiction. The narrator may be addressing you, the audience, but eventually develops the character of the Reader in the broadest sense, describing the Reader as a single male who enjoys reading. The Reader becomes obsessive over the incomplete stories and falls in love with Ludmilla, also known as the Other Reader. The act of reading becomes a bilateral direction of travel: As the audience reads the novel, the novel reads the audience, transforming the Reader from a generic pronoun into an imagined member of Calvino’s book-buying demographic.