Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to sexual situations.

The novel takes the unusual step of directly addressing the audience. “You” (3) is the novel’s very first word, immediately emphasizing the individual identity of the person reading the text. The use of second-person singular to address the audience exemplifies how the novel breaks the fourth wall, or the theoretical barrier between those in the text and those reading the text. The narrator, a figure from within the text, addresses the audience, an entity outside the text. In doing so, the narrator draws attention to the audience’s role in the process of reading the novel. This isn’t so much passive consumption of a text as a self-aware exercise in exploring literary ideas. By turning the audience reading If on a winter’s night a traveler into the central figure in the novel, Calvino draws attention to the act of reading, breaking the fourth wall to involve the audience in exploring the fundamental idea of literature.

This direct address continues throughout the novel, to the point that the Reader emerges as the story’s protagonist. The narrator feels the need to develop the Reader’s character and, in doing so, suggests an innate bias.