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What story down there awaits its end?
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The narrator tells you that your journey is almost over. You finally get some free time, so you put in requests at the library for all the books you haven’t finished. But no one at the library can locate the books. You get jealous of all the other readers with their books.
The penultimate chapter of the book seems to offer the possibility of closure, including the idea that the Reader might finish all the fragments that he started. But once again, he is thwarted. The Reader jealously begins to believe that other readers are having more complete experiences and that he alone struggles to complete a story, but this chapter will challenge that idea.
Themes
Suddenly one of the other readers seems to address you and tells you his theory of the best way to read. Six more readers speak up, each giving academic-sounding theories of reading. Finally, it’s your turn to speak, and you say that you just enjoy reading books from beginning to end without any particular theory. However, recent circumstances have made it impossible for you to complete a book lately.
Each of the readers in this chapter bears some resemblance to Lotaria, the book’s foremost overanalytical reader. Lotaria (and her equivalent, Corinna) have led the Reader astray, causing him to forget his love for Ludmilla and her more straightforward way of reading. By wanting to get back to reading from beginning to end, the Reader expresses a desire to get back to Ludmilla.
Themes
The fifth reader brings up the Arabian Nights, saying that the situation you are in reminds him of it, and he asks permission to tell everyone a story he may have dreamed. He tells about the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid, who sneaks out one night disguised as a merchant when he has insomnia. He ends up losing a game of chance to a maiden that involves seven white pearls and one black pearl. Harun-al-Rashid’s punishment for drawing the black pearl is that he has to kill Harun-al-Rashid. Still in disguise, he accepts his punishment to kill himself, but he asks first to hear what the woman’s grudge against the Caliph is.
The seven white pearls and one black pearl align with how the Reader feels like the outcast in the middle of a circle of seven other readers who seem to mostly agree with each other. Harun-al-Rashid’s punishment for drawing the black pearl is that he must kill himself, perhaps suggesting how the Reader’s quests to follow Marana and find the truth have ultimately been self-destructive. Harun-al-Rashid is so curious to learn about the woman’s grudge that he is willing to give up his own life to hear about it, illustrating the powerful effects of curiosity (which is also what motivated the Reader).
Themes
The fifth reader’s story also gets interrupted. He doesn’t know what his story is called, so you title it after the last words of the story that the fifth reader spoke: He asks anxious to hear the story (referring to the Caliph anxious to hear the story of why the woman wanted to kill him).
The Reader’s choice for the final title is significant: while He asks anxious to hear the story refers to the Caliph, it also describes the Reader himself. Just as in his diary, Flannery mused about Mohammad’s scribe finishing the last lines of the Koran, the Reader is the one who provides the last title of the novel.
Themes
Get the entire If on a winter’s night a traveler LitChart as a printable PDF.
The sixth reader asks to hear all of the titles of the books you haven’t been able to find endings for. You read the list in order: If on a winter's night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story. The sixth reader believes he knows a novel that begins this way.
On the one hand, this passage suggests that the story fragments are more related than the narrator realized: when you put all their titles together, it forms a sentence. But on the other hand, this connection only deepens the mystery, presenting what seems to be the opening lines of a totally new story. The Reader learns that it’s possible to find connections even in a modern world where the truth is fragmented, but he also learns that he may never receive the closure he’s looking for.
Themes
You try to explain that the list you have written down is just a list of titles, not part of a book. The seventh reader questions whether stories really have beginnings and endings, as you, the Reader, expect. In ancient times, stories could only end two ways, with a hero and heroine ending or with them both dying. As soon as you hear this, you decide you have to marry Ludmilla.
The ending of this chapter reflects on what role stories play in society and why they have existed for so long. This passage explores how individual stories may have beginnings and endings, but they also make up fragments in a larger human tradition of storytelling that doesn’t have a clear beginning or end. While it is possible to interpret this moment as an epiphany for the Reader, it actually seems that the Reader is rejecting new knowledge, choosing instead to limit himself to a conventional happy story ending. The novel doesn’t settle on whether this is a good thing, including whether the Reader is living an illusion or whether he has made a healthy choice to avoid overanalyzing things.
Themes
