Metafiction

As an English major, when I begin to read a book I also begin to analyze it. Upon reading Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, I felt somewhat silly in attempting this process. The internal reader, or initial narrator, instructs me, the external reader, in the reading/analyzing process (and is borderline bossy in doing so). Before reading the actual stories (If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Outside the Town of Malbork etc), the internal reader tells the external reader how to approach reading these stories, from picking it out of many other books in the bookstore, all the way down to the precise body position I should place myself in: “you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists”(7). Originally, I was (somewhat irrationally) defensive of this other reader telling me what to do. But as I kept reading, I noticed that the internal reader had good reason for telling me what to do, as he seemed an expert on all things concerning reading. He knows the countless categories of books, “the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading…the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success” to name a few(5).We can see he knows about the process of manufacturing books when he becomes enraged at the misprint in his copy of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (25). He even tells the external reader what to analyze and pay attention to within the actual story when he notes that “what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines.”(35)

What this leads me to believe about this book in general is that it is a type of metafiction. It seems to be a book that is more about reading than writing, since it seems to celebrate the reader more than the writer. True, the internal reader is celebrating the writer and the stories, but the external reader is more emotionally invested in the internal reader than the characters of the stories. I am more concerned with whether or not the internal reader finds Ludmilla more than I am concerned with Gritzvi’s background information or future.