Katherine Tesi

Within these chapters, I continued to ask myself whether or not Calvino’s novel can actually be considered a novel. A general definition of a novel is “a long narrative in literary prose”. Although Calvino’s work has a long narrative intertwined within the chapters (the alternating chapters titled by numbers), there are multiple secondary stories within the text. I can’t help but question if the long narrative is required to be continuous in order to be a novel. Obviously this text cannot be considered a continuous narrative; however it may be deemed a novel because it contains a narrative which does have a beginning, middle and end. I still don’t know whether the inclusion of the secondary stories is enough to make Calvino’s work something other than a novel.