If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Essay Questions

How does Calvino's use of second-person narration affect readers' experience of If on a winter's night a traveler's narrative?

Calvino's choice to use second-person narration, meaning the narrator addresses the reader directly using the pronoun "you" as if they are a character in the story, is highly unusual. Most novels are written either in first person (from the point of view of the main character) or in third person narration (from the perspective of either an omniscient or limited narrator viewing the story from the outside). This choice immediately makes the reader reflect on their role in the story as its reader. It may be an uncomfortable experience for a reader to be told that they are doing and thinking certain things without the ability to choose the path of the story. Jarring a reader out of their comfortable, standard reading experience is a feature of postmodern literature.

Another effect of Calvino's stylistic choice is that female readers may feel especially alienated by the choice of narrative point of view. This is because when Calvino addresses the reader in the second person, he clearly has a male reader in mind. Scholars have disagreed over whether Calvino's choice to make the reader explicitly male. Some believe it reflects his idea of who his readership consists of. Others feel he purposefully calls attention to the way novels in general are written for a male audience, which would be less apparent when novels are written in traditional narrative perspectives.

What role does gender play in If on a winter's night a traveler? Use examples from both the stories-within-the-story and the frame story itself.

Gender, particularly the representation of women, plays a large role in the novel. Since the novel is written in second person narration, the main character of the book is the reader. This reader is portrayed as male and heterosexual, meaning those readers who do not fit this identity could struggle to identify with the story. However, scholars disagree on whether this was purposeful on Calvino's part. He could have been making a point about the way books in his time period were largely written by and for men, or he could simply have been writing based on a biased worldview.

The representation of women in the stories-within-a-story is a parallel issue. All of the narrators of the stories-within-a-story are male, and almost all of the female characters in the stories are romantic objects with little backstory. Again, some believe that Calvino was purposefully calling attention to the domination of male viewpoints in literature, since his stories-within-a-story are meant to mimic and parody various styles of literature. Nevertheless, the novel does not explicitly call out the issue, and so some have felt the portrayal of women does more harm than good.

What is the effect of translation on If on a winter's night a traveler's narrative?

A major theme of If on a winter's night a traveler is translation. Calvino first demonstrates the difficulty of translation in Chapters 3 and 4 when the reader visits the office of Professor Uzzi-Tuzii. Calvino describes in vivid detail how the professor translates aloud for the reader from a Cimmerian text: "going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its commutations..." (68). With this quote, Calvino shows how delicate the balance is between providing context and allowing a reader to immerse themselves in a story. For a reader who is reading If on a winter's night a traveler in a language other than Italian, this scene has particular resonance since it shows that a translation can never be exactly the same as an original work.

Later, Calvino reintroduces the theme of translation through the character of Ermes Marana. Marana to demonstrates the power a translator can wield since he uses his reputation as a translator to sow discord throughout the worldwide publishing industry. While any mistakes Professor Uzzi-Tuzii makes as a translator are simply due to the inherent difficulty of the task, Marana purposefully misleads readers in an attempt to destroy their trust in books. The large-scale impact of Marana's falsification in the novel shows the importance of trusted, high-quality translators to the publishing industry and the world.

Compare and contrast the characters Ludmilla and Lotaria in If on a winter's night a traveler. How does Calvino use these characters to demonstrate and criticize different ways of reading?

Ludmilla and Lotaria are sisters, but they could not be more different. Ludmilla becomes the love interest of the main character, the Reader, and many other male characters in the book are intrigued by her. She is beautiful, mysterious, and intelligent, with ever-shifting views on precisely the type of story she would most like to read. It is apparent especially from Silas Flannery's positive impression of her that she represents an idealized reader who truly cares about the craft of writing and reads with care and focus.

In contrast, Lotaria represents Calvino's negative view of what academia and technology have done to reading. Rather than reading for pleasure and with an open mind as Ludmilla does, Lotaria goes into a reading experience with a set of academic perspectives such as sexuality and economics. Later in If on a winter's night a traveler, she reveals that she often doesn't even read a book before analyzing and critiquing it; she merely puts the book into a machine which counts the number of times each word in the book is used and judges a novel based on these patterns. Silas Flannery's negative response to this idea demonstrates to the reader Calvino's own views on this type of academic practice.

How is imagery used to clarify If on a winter's night a traveler's unusual style of storytelling?

Imagery is literary description of sensations, including descriptions of what a reader should imagine seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, and feeling while reading a story. Imagery is generally used to immerse a reader in a story and allow them to empathize with the experience of characters. Imagery is of particular importance in If on a winter's night a traveler since the story shifts so many times. Calvino needed to make extremely clear the distinction between the world of the frame story (with the reader, Ludmilla, Ermes Marana, and so on) and the worlds inside the many stories-within-a-story. Furthermore, he needed to distinguish between the styles of the stories-within-a-story to create an effective pastiche of many literary genres. The first paragraphs of his stories-within-a-story are often laden with imagery, particularly vivid smells such as "a passing whiff of station cafe odor" (10) or "an odor of frying" (34). Because smells are particularly linked with memories and emotion, these descriptions immediately give the reader a sense of physical connection to the story. Throughout different stories he focuses on different kinds of imagery, such as sounds in "In a network of lines that enlace" and visuals in "on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon," which also helps to distinguish the stories from one another.