I read “Who is Reading” before If on a winter’s night a traveler, so I really connected the idea of the authorial audience in the narration of Italo Calvino’s novel. Calvino opens the novel by addressing his audience with second person narration. He shapes his hypothetical audience by actually writing how they are acting, stating how “you” is sitting or acting at the bookstore. He is even aware that different people are reading his novel and provides multiple possibilities. However, Calvino also proposes another way to look at his audience. He also implies that he does not need to understand his audience because to know who his reader is, “would be indiscreet to ask” (32). What he believes counts is “the state of your spirit now” which he could never be able to articulate for his entire audience (32). I think by assuming certain things about the audience allow Calvino to manipulate and direct us throughout the novel.
One of the ways he manipulates us is by ending the stories at their climax. It always left me wanting more, just like the reader in the novel. Even after Calvino set up the pattern, going in-between the two readers and the stories they were reading, I always became entranced by the stories that I almost forgot they were going to leave me hanging. But by leaving the stories at their climax and not finishing them, I think it also allows the reader to fill in their own ending of each story.
I also connected the first story, If on a winter’s night a traveler, as how I was beginning the novel. The character is at a railway station where the tracks go on “as far as the eye can see” like the reader is starting a new journey into the novel (10). And you as the reader do not know where the story is going to lead. The people at the station “close the fans of cards against their chest” because they are not going to tell you were the story is going (10). The only way to find out is to continue reading where Calvino directs you.