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Chapter 2
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 beginning of this story is disorienting, throwing out several character names that are familiar to the narrator but unfamiliar to the reader. In many ways, it is the opposite of the previous story, which started with just one narrator and took a long time to reveal any named characters.
Themes
The narrator comes into the kitchen. He is leaving home for the first time and about to spend a season on Mr. Kauderer the farmer’s estate, while the Mr. Kauderer’s son, Ponko, is about the take the narrator’s place at Kudigwa. The narrator gets sentimental about the smells of the Kudigwa kitchen because he’s about to lose them forever. The narrator asks if you, the Reader, feel that the text is slipping away from you and that perhaps something has been lost in the translation.
Although the narrator of this story is different from the previous narrators, he continues to address his audience as “you,” leaving it ambiguous as to whether the novel as a whole contains a multitude of narrators or just one who takes on different forms in each new story. Translation is a recurring theme in the story, and language differences are another reason why different readers might experience the same text in different ways.
Themes
As the narrator is packing up his things in preparation to give his room to Ponko, he sees that Ponko is holding a picture of a girl that he is trying to hide. The narrator manages to briefly grab the picture from Ponko and sees that the name “Zwida Ozkart” is written on it. Ponko is angry at the narrator invading his privacy, and the two begin to fight. The narrator feels jealous of how Ponko seems to possess Zwida and also may soon have Brigd, whom the narrator will lose when he leaves.
In the previous numbered chapter, the narrator’s audience (“you”) has to swap books because of a printing error, and this story echoes that with the swap of the narrator and Ponko. The narrator’s seemingly undeclared love for Brigd also reflects the narrator’s audience’s attraction to Ludmilla, showing how fiction can be a way for people like the narrator’s audience to see their own problems reflected in a new form.
Themes
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Later, the narrator goes into a big room where he overhears Mr. Kauderer the farmer talking about an ongoing feud his family has with the Ozkarts, which just recently led to two deaths in his family. Mr. Kauderer has moved Ponko so he will be safe from the Ozkarts. The narrator’s mother worries whether the Ozkarts will accidentally attack Gritzvi (the narrator’s name in this story), mistaking him for Ponko. Mr. Kauderer assures her that only Kauderers are in danger, and so the narrator takes a step forward toward Mr. Kauderer.
The story doesn’t reveal the narrator’s name until the very end (Gritzvi), perhaps to emphasize the point from the first story at the train station about how “I” can be a way of concealing things, like a name. Also like the first story, this one ends with the narrator’s life potentially in danger due to forces he doesn’t understand. The constant threat of death at the end of these stories suggests that it is a nearly universal human fear the resists easy answers—just as this story doesn’t provide closer at the ending.
Themes
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