Introduction
In literature, there exists a danger, or so Italo Calvino believes; that danger, he believes, is of overanalyzing works and in doing so, destroying the enjoyment of reading. In his novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, Calvino attempts to shift the focus of the reader from the words in his novel and other novels that speak about life to the life that those words show; he tries to alert the reader to the dangers of unrestrained academic analysis while also exposing the reader to this threatened form of entertainment in order to save the pleasure of reading from being destroyed. Calvino is able to accomplish this through the versatility of style which he displays, the way in which he establishes characterization, and the way in which he describes setting.
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