If on a Winter's Night a Traveler: Postmodernism

In our world surrounded by various natural beauties, as human beings, we all look at the same sky, breathe the same breath, and witness the same sunrise. The fact that we are individuals born in different continents cannot change the fact that the world we live in has common histories with developments, inventions, wars, births and deaths.

The moment one of us closes his eyes and bids farewell to our impermanent world, another of us opens his eyes to a new life; just as the currents we created as human beings get old and we derive new currents from those currents. Every new birth is a new date; It is a movement, it is a culture, so there are "cultural codes" imposed on us from the moment we are born. Our cultural codes are the fictional realities of our societies. The fictional cultural codes of our societies are proof that although we breathe the same air, we do not interpret the worlds in which we were born and raised in the same way. Our differences in economic power, our unequal human rights and our different political views are based on our individual freedoms that have been undermined.

These cultural codes, which are imposed on the foundations of our lives that we believe we have established with our choices, even tell us what kind of character we will have and what kind of book we will read. We need a book that will remind us that we are the only protagonists of our lives in order to attain our freedom suppressed by our cultural codes. Italo Calvino confronts us readers with a magnificent introduction to the fact that our world can revolve around ourselves in his book "If a Traveler on a Winter's Night," in which he is the protagonist: "You are about to start reading Italo Calvino's new novel If You Are A Traveler on a Winter's Night. Relax. Pack up. Let go of all the thoughts in your mind. Let the world that surrounds you vanish into obscurity…”

Every section is broken down into two parts. The narrative follows 'you' as you try to read the novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveler in the first section, always in the second person ('you'). The second section of each chapter is chosen to take up by a new book that 'you' is attempting to read, which is different every time. The story looks into the nature of art and reading, with literary genres and ideas resonating throughout both sections of the chapters. A discourse of fiction in the first section, for example, is mirrored in a detective novel in the second. The subjective experience of interpretation and the relationship among both books and reality are two other themes. Italo Calvino eventually employs his subversive techniques to attract attention to the plot's development as well as other para-textual and meta-textual elements of the novel that otherwise would have been overlooked in a straightforward explanation of the narrative.