About a hypernovel or the narrative structure of If on a winter’s night a traveler, by Italo Calvino

Abstract

The novel If on a winter’s night a traveler  (1979) closes Italo Calvino’s fictional production of the 1970s; the decade also comprises Invisible cities (1972) and The castle of crossed destinies (1973). These books are the result of intense research work, or rather, Calvino searches for and tests new ways and materials for literary composition, notoriously affecting the narrative organization. Current research studies the narrative structure of If on a winter’s night a traveler, and tries to understand how interaction occurs among the different narrative levels of the work. A descriptive analysis of the work has been carried out, and the obtained data were studied from the view of the mise en abyme concept, reported by Rita (2014), and the reflections towards personal pronouns in the novel, exposed by Butor (1977) and Cacciatori (1990). It has been verified that the narrative structure is divided into two distinct levels: novel-frame and micro novels, which, in their turn, get entwined. Additionally, the employment of the mise en abyme resource was noted either at the enunciation level or within the enunciation itself, restoring the speculating relation. Results show that these elements cause the articulation of two narrative levels and the modular organic structure of the novel.