If on a winter's night a traveler Fate and Free Will Quotes

Silas Flannery, encountering a group of boy scouts, hears them say that a UFO is nearby and that aliens have been trying to send communications through the brainwaves of an author living in the area. This author is no doubt Flannery himself, who earlier this same day has been wondering about how he could become a passive conduit for someone else's ideas. Now he learns that he might actually be a conduit and not even know it. His fantasy might have already come true. There's just no way of telling. Classic Calvino.

In the final scene of Around an empty grave, the young Nacho realizes that his adventures have been guided completely by fate. Throughout the story, he's heard people speak about when his father came to Oquedal and how a man named Faustino Higueras was killed. At this final moment, Nacho realizes that he is reliving the exact battle that his father had with Faustino. Having seen his young opponent earlier in the novel, Nacho also realizes that fate has been leading him to this moment for some time. In this scene, Calvino plays on the reader's expectation that everything that happens in a book happens for a reason. But what Calvino doesn't give you is the end of the battle; you never get to find out if Nacho simply recreated his father's victory, or if fate had other plans for him.

Arkadian Porphyrich, the Ircanian official, tells you about the "Spirit" that he thinks is involved in the process of reading. On the one hand, Porphyrich says that when he reads, he's disinterested. But at the same time, he's always alert to the potential meanings a book could have. In this sense, Calvino uses this scene to speak about the Spirit of reading itself, in which the reader doesn't have free will, but neither does the book fully control him. Instead, there's a dialogue that happens between the two—a dialogue that can only function properly if the reader comes to the book with an open mind.