Calvino: If On a Winter's Night a Traveller

In the first fragment of a novel within If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Calvino is playing with the genre of mystery or espionage. He doesn't plan on writing an espionage novel, but instead uses the typical details of an espionage novel to explore the literary devices used to introduce a story. He is actually seducing his protagonist, a reader, as well as us, the reader.

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller is a story about reading, and a novel that knows it is a novel. The story understands it has been written by the author; characters and places realize they exist only as much as the author defines them.

Calvino uses descriptions of his literary technique as a technique to introduce his story. Through the novel, he moves in and out of this meta-narrative with a protagonist that is aware he is a character in the author's creation. The story is both an explanation of how to introduce a story and a story unto itself.

Some of his techniques:

Mystery: A strange thing is happening.
-An air of mystery surrounds the protagonist. He is supposed to secretly pass a suitcase along to a colleague. The contents of the suitcase are unknown, but they must not be discovered.
-The protagnoist has no name other than "I" to give him one would lessen the mystery
-Nothing about his past is known, other than something happened to make him late.
All of these aspects of the story fill the reader with questions and the desire to find out the answers. Calvino withholds information to keep the reader interested in the story.

Familiarity: A strange thing is happening in a familiar place.
-A stranger arrives in a small train station, a familiar place for most readers
-He visits the local tavern, again a recognizable location
-The description of these places match our expectations
-This contrasts the mystery surrounding the protagonist
The familiar aspects of the story comfort the reader, and make the mysterious aspects of the story even more strange.

Complication: Things are getting stranger
-The stranger doesn't want to get involved with the locals, but ends up talking to a woman in the tavern
-The woman has seen the man the stranger was supposed to meet
-A member of the village turns out to be in on the plan and orders the strager to abort his mission
Things are going to get a lot more complicated before they get resolved. We want to read on because we don't know what is going on, and we want to know more. If the author came right out and said what the story was about, we may or may not be interested in it. Now we are interested in the process of finding out. The history of the stranger and the suitcase could be relatively boring as long as the way we find out about them in interesting.

Irony and Humor: These devices are all in jest
-Calvino expects his readers to follow his play and understand his techniques
-He engages the reader by writing about the joys of reading