Calvino, Endings, and Women: A Look at If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller L.E. DuBois College

In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, we see how Calvino attempts to compare the reading of a novel to a man pursuing a woman. In this text, the reader takes on the role of a male protagonist attempting to read a book. Along the way, the protagonist meets a female reader, whom he begins to pursue throughout the rest of the novel. This pursuit mirrors the interactions between us, as the reader, and the text. As we read, we are drawn in by narrative beginnings. While this interpretation may at first seem sexist or misrepresentative of female readers, further analysis will reveal the validity of this claim. In this novel, Calvino's main goal is to examine the reader's experience. By portraying this as a romantic encounter, we can draw important conclusions about the reader's experience. While it may appear that Calvino only values the masculine experience of the reader, this comparison will prove to enrich the understanding of the relationship between the text and the reader as we discover how Calvino's novel is more in line with female pleasure.

In Earl G. Ingersoll's book Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel, Ingersoll himself examines the lack of endings in Calvino's novel and how...