If on a winter's night a traveler

If on a winter’s night a traveler is a novel written by Italo Calvino. Although I really enjoyed the writing style and through that the author’s use of second-person narration was very interesting and enjoyable, I found myself very confused several times while in the process of reading the novel. Italo Calvino is an author who uses post-modernist writing, a style that is experimental and abstract. This is apparent throughout the novel. In chapter eight, Calvino tells the reader that he believes the process of writing makes it impossible to write the novel that they author intends to create: “all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities…if I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps the pen and writes…Who would move this hand?” (171). Calvino acknowledge that it is impossible for a writer to keep his or her own biases out of the novel they are writing, and so even non-fiction writing has some fictional aspects in it. I related this back to the article in the DePauw magazine, which talked about a program that was created to write creative stories without the need of an author. This may worry some people that the value of literature will diminish once computers are able to write our books for us, but I on the other hand, and perhaps Calvino would agree, that this new developments offers a unique opportunity to see what kind of literature could be creative without the influence of a human author.