The Following Story & My Paper Topic

I noticed a couple of quotes from The Following Story that I will probably end up using in my paper about Italo Calvino's work If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

pg. 67-- "You knew where we were going, and it was enough to know you knew. But I can't talk to you like this: you can't be both in the story and not in it."

pg. 70-- "To a large extent, you already existed before you had anything to do with it at all."

Any reader of Calvino's work will notice that both of these texts are linked to Traveler by their use of the second person narrative style. I really enjoy the second quote because of the notion that the story "you" take part in has been written long before you read it and you eventually came to reading it. It is interesting for me to consider how Calvino wrote a book presupposing the reader before the reader had read the book or perhaps even been born!

In the first quote it is interesting how Nooteboom uses Mussert to confront the reader and address the two roles as reader and narrator/author. Calvino also does much of that by acting as an internal narrator, someone within you but also without you (Beatles reference), who is dictating what you are doing... and that person is correct.