Deconstruction of the myth of language as a transparent tool of representation in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Postmodernist fiction, with an endless questioning of the existing canons of the past and the present, rejects all the conventional claims vis-à-vis epistemology and ontology. Postmodernists such as Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Lyotard have rejected the conventional ideology in terms of how one perceives and gains knowledge. The question of representation becomes a pressing question in the era of postmodernism. In If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino narrates this nature of language as a tool that stalls the possibility transparent narration. Language assumes the quality of Derrida’s ‘aporia’ and instead of presenting stable meanings, highlights either multiple meanings or no meaning at all. The fiction typifies the epistemological problems and suggests the inability of capturing knowledge. It is construes that the notion of representation becomes essential issues in postmodern fiction. In this process, postmodern stance on language, in which the final signified is reduced to the status of endless deferral, occupy the center stage.