Extended Essays 2021

has intentions for the way his text should be interpreted. Calvino has a contemporary approach,

and ‘still hasn’t made up his mind’. This approach, however, also makes it hard for readers to

trust the word of the narrator, as Calvino expresses, he is still deciding what will happen.

The clear use of metafiction in IOAWNAT establishes the concept of an unreliable narrator.

Booth defines a na rrator as ‘reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms

of the work, unreliable when he does not’ 16 . By using metafiction to tamper with the form, it

can be hard for readers to distinguish the ‘norms’ within the novel. In this way, Calvino is

crafting an unreliable narrator, and activating the contemporary Reader Response Theory. This

theory considers reader’s reactions to literature and how they interpret the meaning of the text 17 .

By referencing the real world, the world “you” are in and the world within the novel “you” are

reading, Calvino sets up an interpretive role for readers. As per the contemporary reader-

centred approach, ‘because the text is made from fragments surrounded by blanks or gaps,

readers are encouraged to fill in those gaps accordingly’ 18 . By exte rnalising the author’s role

and using metafiction to challenge the ‘norms’ of the work, readers may have a ‘multiplicity

of interpretations’ for Calvino’s work . This is how Calvino crafts an unreliable narrator, by

allowing readers to interpret the text in their own way instead of providing a historically centred

omniscient narrator to deliver his fictional world to the reader.

The same metafictional technique is used in Cloud Atlas . The novel is made up of six sub-

stories all intertwined by various symbols. In The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish Part

II , Mitchell makes a clear allusion away from the fictional world into the real world. Mitchell

declares that

16 The Rhetoric of Fiction. Wayne C. Booth, 1961 17 Reader Response Criticism . Purdue University 18 Approaches to Reading Practices. QCAA, 2011

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