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It is primarily difficult to define Postmodernism literature due to its novelty in technique, versatile ideas, and its break from the traditional narrative writing. Basically “If on a winter's night a traveler” is a novel about the reading experience. When discussing the postmodern literature, Calvino’s novel of 1979 “If on a winter's night a traveler” definitely is a work that is worth to be examined within this context. While ascribing the features of the postmodern fiction to a specified work at times can prove to be an undertaking that is both controversial and challenging in nature. This novel has proven to be both fascinating and also to be innovative work of the fiction which is postmodern. “If on a winter's night a traveler” authored by Italo Calvino, is a postmodern novel since it deviates from the obvious objectivity provided by the omniscient external narration normally found in nearly all traditional books(Calvino & William, pp.13-18). All through chapter two, Calvino employs second person viewpoint, where he narrates of the readers of the novel, are the key characters in his plot. The author constantly employs the pronoun “you” in making the reader to feel more engaged in what is happening and points out directly the relationship between the author, the text, and the readers. Self-reflectivity also is found in nearly all postmodern novels are well-known to possess. Calvino’s novel portrays numerous remarkable literary devices that use “key characteristics’’ postmodern fiction as illustrated in the parameters summarized by Tim Woods in Beginning postmodernism which was his publication (Woods, pp.65-66). This essay will try illuminating some of the postmodern characteristics which are present in the Calvino’s novel, and also examine the authors’s application as well as how various themes are executed.
Possibly the first obvious postmodern device found in this novel by Calvino is that of metafiction. The author participates in a kind of combinatory narrative experiment since beginning of his novel that he later explains as causing a “hyper novel” which is aimed at giving the significance of a novel through the means of the concentrated form. In order to execute this chapter, twelve chapters were interpolated in the company often fragmented portions of the other novels that are outlined into the plotline; deviating within conceptual framework from the common crux (Weiss, pp.34-41). Use of metafiction by Calvino is a crucial role in the narrative of his work since he refers to the reader as “you”, which made it clear to the reader since the beginning of the first pages that they are experiencing “If on a winter's night a traveler” within the metafictional framework: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter's night a traveler”. Throughout the blurring of embedded texts and framing texts, it appears that Calvino tries also to dissolve the disconnection between the text of the narrative and the perceived reality. Efforts at this narrative action perhaps are best demonstrated in chapter nine when Calvino gives the following remarks: “….You find yourself to be a prisoner of the system in which every aspect of life is counterfeit, a fake” (Calvino & William, pp.72-94).
Self-reflexivity has a finite presence clearly all through this novel by Calvino. While the German Romantics theorized concerning it, few key works put this concept actually into motion up pending this period. Calvino’s self-conscious writing is perceived to regularly question his narration, whereas at the same time, raises moderate amounts of satire and humor to demonstrate the poststructuralist view concerning reading over writing hierarchy; frequently through means of subversion and restating. Calvino once affirmed that “the process of literary composition has been taken to pieces and reassembled; the decisive moment in literacy life is bound to be the reading act." Ludmilla, the “other” central character, also conveys a lack of interest in the writing act as she prefers to participate solely in the reading act (Calvino & William, pp.27-28).
Through the use of fragmented novel sections by Calvino that occurs in this novel, there excessive abolition of the cultural divide of low and high cultures as described by Woods. While Calvino’s literary standpoint in works like this one at times have been expressed as highbrow, all introductory chapters found within the novel are to a great extent different in both plot and theme as well as in genre; Calvino combine everything from thriller, adventure, and mystery genres to classical fiction forms that are more traditional. The multiplicity of the storylines entrenched into the underlying narrative as well presents another feature of the postmodern writing; particularly multiple fictive selves. Every novel fragment all through the story offers a distinctive isolated narration plotline which serves all together to advance the underlying story (Nell & Cohen, pp.27-32). A distinct intertextuality sense exists at play between the narratives, while all together there is a sense of pastiche that is generic and it guides Ludmilla as well as the reader through these numerous fictions which are apparently disconnected.
The identity notion found in Calvino’s novel also is an interesting aspect. To a large extent, the story alludes to questioning the writing act itself as well as questions of the ontological uncertainty. Using these narrative stories which have no closure generates a postmodern situation in the literature. This seems to strengthen Calvino’s point that the world’s reality is basically tied to meaning by the concepts of culture as well as language. It also seems that the author does not believe in the fact that objectivity reality may exist outside of culture and language with any function that is meaningful. This view illustrates the epistemological predicaments centered upon the reality awareness. With these concerns illuminated, Calvino appears to replicate upon the literature as his own system of knowing or knowledge. It appear that Calvino expected to articulate in this work, together with his postmodern novel (1983) Mr. Palomar, an insight that this genre should stress involvement of the reader to obtain meaning (Calvino & William, pp.23-31).
There is a literacy level complexity at play used by Calvino so as to disrupt narrative techniques and also bring them back as well under governance. Even as the novel is undoubtedly, an enjoyable read upon numerous levels, postmodern techniques at the play generates a clever form of literacy game which is never completely satisfied for the reader, notwithstanding the eventual resolution of the novel at its end. The subjectivity offered by Calvino to his readers is the one that maintains them even to some extent beyond the reach of postmodern text. Bringing to mind the printing error that puts the plot in motion and it is imperative to not that the real reader’s reading of “If on a winter's night a traveler” is actually not disrupted by whichever error. In reality, their reading is disrupted by an intentional creative choice to end at the moment the intratext. Even the decision to end the novel truly does not reflect the reader’s experience. The final line is meant for the Reader: “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished reading the novel by Italo Calvino (Calvino & William, pp.27). With the exception of that, for the material reader, the reader, this line is a deception: “I have not almost finished reading “If on a winter’s night a traveler.” I have completed it!” however, no, Calvino denies the opportunity of escaping the text which is absent to both his reader and his Reader.
As mentioned above, the reader and the text is altered by creative choice of Calvino, a case of great manipulation that cannot be disregarded even as one affirms that the text to be independent of the author. However, maybe it is this autonomy of the author specifically that imprisons Flannery of Calvino and, by means of extension, his readers. It is argued that the absence and impossibility is a postmodernity function; the reader relationship to an emasculated, absent author is irrevocable (Calvino & William, pp. 49).
“If on a winter’s night a traveler” is an exceptionally complex and devilishly clever novel which works on various diverse levels across numerous themes. The first, as well as most apparent of these, is the metafictional feature which questions people’s reality notion and its connection with the fictional or even “fake” in the postmodern world. There are also various other contemporary world aspects which inform the work like questions of identity, intertextuality, and originality (Calvino & William, pp.113). Uncertainty, complexity, frustration, confusion are all features of the contemporary world as seen and experienced by Calvino. Underlying all these themes there is the sense of ironic intelligence and of humor and during the end Calvino’s work turn out to be a self-reflexive game which is extremely clever which the author plays with us the readers.
In Calvino’s novel, the impracticable event of the postmodernity is just like a prison, which Calvino genders. Practically all of the text, be it the intratext or main narrative, is written from the viewpoint of men trying to conquer women. This is untruthful precisely once when the Narrator commences describing the viewpoint of the Other Reader. (Calvino & William, pp.15) This must not, nevertheless, be mistaken for Calvino’s endeavor to set free a female awareness from the phallocentric text. Somewhat, this alteration of the perception to female from male is another approach in which the author and his supreme Narrator changes the Reader’s subjectivity, which consist of the intratext in addition to the Reader’s slower alteration from suffered book-lover to the international detective as well as victim of textual Twilight Zone of Calvino: “The you that was shifted to the Other Reader can, at any sentence, be addressed to you again. You are always a possible you.” (Calvino & William, pp.16) Although it can be arguable that this method communicates the possibility of postmodernity to pass to social constructions of sexuality and gender, Calvino more significantly employs this device as well as others to make the impression upon the Reader and the weakness of their bias in its subservience to the supreme Narrator’s (and, through sanctified extension, Calvino), usually which takes on a definitely gendered undertone.
This novel by Calvino is subjective. It also greatly illuminates about postmodernism. Although the story may be over, the postmodernism tale continues. Postmodernism is mostly forward thinking, inventive and progressive. Sullivan states that the novel, “If on a winter’s night a traveler” is outstandingly untraditional in many aspects and is very progressive in this sense (Sullivan, pp.156).On the last page of “If on a winter’s night a traveler” Ludmilla asks “You” if you ever get tired of reading. The reply was that you have “almost” finished reading the novel (Calvino & William, pp.260). The postmodern journey, therefore, begins and continues.
In various levels, “If on a winter’s night a traveler” struggles with philosophical postmodernity limitations. However, Calvino also recognizes the perpetual incompleteness state that is implied by postmodernity, where the absent text serves as a fundamental framework as well as a device for experiencing the work. Calvino’s excellent self-conscious exploration of reading as well as postmodern writing is layered extensively. With comparative regularity, the same structures that are within the Calvino’s novel that differentiate the intratext from the main narrative text are severely disrupted. Even as Calvino in this novel blurs the line which is between the Reader and the reader the text that is not changes to be not much jointly exclusive as intrinsically contradictory (Calvino & William, pp. 57-68).
Therefore, when the printer’s mistake disrupts the Reader’s reading the Calvino’s novel, in reality it does not disrupt the reader, who continues confronting Calvino’s novel as a text created of absent texts (Calvino & William, pp.14). All together, the reader is unavoidably involved within the impossibility of the novel, experiencing the text from the Reader’s viewpoint. The Reader is the character within the absent text. “If on a winter’s night a traveler” is the perfect example of the philosophical gray zone which Bewes keeps on referring in his dissection of postmodernity.
Use of absent text by Calvino, nonetheless, disregards categorization of literary honesty by Bewes, wherein the reader and the author together begin the journey of postmodern text. As has been revealed, in the course of reading “If on a winter’s night a traveler”, the intratext is changed from the present into the absent text. However, this alteration cannot probably occur devoid of the intentional exclamation of Calvino as the author. Even though one upholds that Calvino and the Narrator are separate, undoubtedly the person responsible for the alteration is not Narrator who only portrays the text as it transforms and happens. Calvino, hovering and silent, as well as absent within his personal novel, cautiously plots the course of the journey of the reader just as the Reader does, influencing an alteration of the intratext just like he influences the alteration of the reader into the Reader. Some things are extra manipulative compared to manipulating the reader’s existential state in service of the philosophical exploration of the postmodernity (Calvino & William, pp.94-97).
In conclusion, what would seem to be a plea by Calvino to comprehend the mutual prison of the postmodernity is in reality a hoax, something of a ruse, or an appeal to the Stockholm syndrome. Through sexualizing and gendering the imprisoning, this novel by Calvino turns out to be highly ironic, and as with the majority of Calvino’s devices, progressively unstable. In fact, “If on a winter's night a traveler” is a novel in disrepair, in pieces, and subsists as a metaphor for the entire literature within the postmodernity snare.

Works Cited
Calvino, Italo, and William Weaver. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. Print.
McCabe, Nell H., and Samuel S. Cohen. Explicating the Incipits a Writer's Journey in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Columbia, Mo.: U of Missouri--Columbia, 2010. Print.
Sullivan, Laura. "Women Reading Calvino Reading Calvino." Mississippi Philological
Association (1994): 156-169.
Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia, S.C.: U of South Carolina, 1993. Print.
Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester: Manchester UP ;, 1999. Print.