What's the Reader of a Second-Person Narrative Expected to Do? Discourse Structure and Point of View in Italo Calvino's "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler"

The paper explores the narrative techniques employed in Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveller”, in which the reader’s envisaged reactions to the text are presented as already part of the narrative. On the one hand, the text tells the story of a second-person protagonist, both talked about and addressed as “you”, whose experiences as a reader appear to systematically coincide with the implied reader’s experience of the novel itself. On the other hand, this all-inclusive, superordinate narrative framework contains a set of embedded narratives presented as read by the protagonist of the main story. In addition, the novel reports the processes through which it is experienced by its implied reader and author (metanarration). The novel appears to implicitly ask its readers to metaread about their suspension of disbelief.