Metafiction: Calvino’s Narrative Style in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Anonymous College

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (hereafter Winter’s Night), authored by Italo Calvino, has often been critically analyzed by scholars for its unique narrative style and the role it has played in establishing metafiction as a definitive genre at the forefront of the Postmodernist era. Metafiction is fiction that possesses self-awareness of the relationship between the act of writing that has borne it and the readership that consumes it. It attempts to eliminate the illusionary aspect to storytelling, and in doing so, it achieves the awareness where it can engage in discourse about the process of its creation with the reader. This effectively embeds the reader as another entity within its story. Calvino uses metafiction to break the fourth wall that exists between the story and the reader and analyze the act of reading itself. He comments on the format of storytelling within them and the kind of stories they should contain according to the accepted norm.

Metafiction, in its quest to achieve self-consciousness, carries an ironic paradox within its journey throughout its making. Nella Cotrupi addresses this singular aspect of metafiction in her journal article that analyses Calvino’s novel and the meta-narrative within. In her...