If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Throughout If on a winter’s night a traveler, pronouns play a significant role. The way that the novel uses pronouns symbolizes the extent to which it plays with (and rejects) traditional literary expectations. The use of the second-person singular pronoun “you” is an example of this. Rather than using first-person singular (“I”) or third person singular (“he” or “she”), as in most literature, the narrator addresses the audience directly as “you.” This rejection of the traditions of narration and storytelling, right from the very first word of the novel, signifies the extent to which the text defies expectations. In addition, the use of the second-person singular pronoun signifies the author’s desire to explicitly involve the audience in the reading experience. The audience isn’t just reading Italo Calvino’s novel; the audience is directly being told that they’re “reading Italo Calvino’s new novel” (3). The use of “you” as a pronoun and the description of the audience member reading the text symbolizes the novel’s focus on self-awareness and eagerness to defy expectations. The unconventional use of pronouns is as much a direct address to the audience as the pronouns themselves, because the rejection of convention is built into the fundamental grammar of the narration. From the foundation up, If on a winter’s night a traveler shows the audience that the traditions of literature are malleable.

Throughout the novel, the use of the pronoun to address the Reader shifts and changes. In the early main chapters, the narrator first addresses the audience as “you.” Later, however, this address to a theoretical “you” evolves into a more fully-fledged character. The narrator explains that “you” isn’t as vague and abstract as it once was and begins to assign certain demographic qualities to “you,” such as the gender and age of the likely audience member. This alters the effect of the pronoun’s use in the novel; no longer is “you” solely a pronoun: Now it bears a certain degree of social expectation. It now has an identity that it previously lacked. This shift in identity represents the evolution of language and the way in which semiotic theory suggests that words mean more than their simple, signified meaning. The pronoun “you” changes in meaning over the course of the novel as the narrator defines the character via demographic expectations, revealing the biases of the narrator himself as well as those of the literary market at the moment when the novel was written. “You” no longer signifies only the audience reading the novel but also the expectations of the narrator about who might be reading the novel and the Reader’s experience thus far in it. The evolution of the pronoun’s use comes to symbolize the manner in which language can evolve and change.

In addition, the narration of If on a winter’s night a traveler uses the first-person singular pronoun “I.” In addition to the self-aware narration of the main story, each individual story (and Silas Flannery’s diary entries) uses this first-person singular pronoun. The stylistic similarities across the individual stories and the main narration is another instance of recurrence. Just as characters appear and reappear throughout these stories, performing roles and functions according to their archetype of hero, love interest, or antagonist, the narration is subject to the same literary forces. The narrator of each story may not be the same, but they all share similarities, creating a multifaceted, complex, and subjective version of the first-person singular “I,” which recurs across the stories. This use of similar narrators shows that recurrence isn’t limited to characters, but is a foundational element of the novel’s literary intent. The pronoun “I” becomes as universal and as subjective as each of the character archetypes.