Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Six Characters in Search of an Author, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Reality, Illusion, and Identity
Authorship and Meaning
Action, Fate, and Absurdity
The Nuclear Family
Summary
Analysis
After a bell resumes the action, the Step-Daughter declares that she is “not going to mix [her]self up in this mess” and runs onstage with the Child, who seems confused about where they are. “The stage,” the Step-Daughter explains, is “where people play at being serious.” She and the Child are in “a horrid comedy,” where “it’s all make-believe.” But this can be better, like having “a make-believe fountain [rather] than a real one” for the Child. The Step-Daughter insists that the Mother does not love the Child because of the Boy, who has cautiously come out on stage. The Step-Daughter grabs him, notices a revolver in his pocket, and declares that he should kill the Father and/or the Son.
The Second Act abruptly begins with a series of metatheatrical references from the Step-Daughter. She brings up the title of the fictional Pirandello play from the First Act—“Mixing it Up”—and contrasts the “serious[ness]” of theater with the “comedy” of her life, but also implies that (by coming onstage) she and the Child are in a “make-believe” world rather than the a “real” one. Her reference to the fountain and the revolver in the Boy’s pocket make no sense yet, but make it clear that something sinister is in the works. The Step-Daughter’s extraordinary attention to the Child and disdain for her brother, the Boy, raises the question of whether the young Child might actually be the Step-Daughter’s (and not the Mother’s) daughter.
Themes
The Father and Manager walk onstage and tell the Step-Daughter that they are ready, and just need her for some final business. She reluctantly follows them inside, and the Son and Mother exit the office and come onstage. The Son laments that he “can’t even get away” and refuses to acknowledge the Mother, who complains that her “punishment [is] the worst of all” and calls her Son “so cruel.” Facing the other way, the Son laments the Father’s insistence that their drama can become a play: the Father seems to believe “he has got the meaning of it all,” and that what happened revealed a side of himself that was supposed to be private. But the Son declares that he has been forced to publicly reveal his parents’ shameful selfishness and failure to truly fulfill the roles of “father and mother.”
The Son’s sense of entrapment in the Father’s self-serving public spectacle suggests a parallel between Characters’ entrapment in a story and Actors’ entrapment in a script, on the one hand, and individuals’ entrapment in the world and powerlessness before their fates, on the other. It becomes clear that the Son cares about the family violating normative roles and scripts insofar as it affects public appearances and others’ attitudes toward him, while he does not much care about if his parents actually fulfill their supposed roles. Indeed, he actively refuses to engage with them, which is a central reason for the Mother’s continued agony. In caring more about the appearance of a normal family than actually having one, the Son reveals the way that (for Pirandello) these appearances and expectations are deceptive.
Themes
Everyone comes back on stage—the Actors, Property Man, Prompter, Father, Step-Daughter, and the Manager, who tells the Machinist to prepare “floral decorations” and the Property Man to find the yellow sofa (which does not exist). Against the Step-Daughter’s protests, the Manager agrees to use the green sofa. He calls for a “shop window—long and narrowish” and a small table. The Father asks for a mirror and the Step-Daughter for a screen. The Manager sends the Property Man to find all of the above items, plus “some clothes pegs.”
By showing how the Manager and Characters negotiate to create a more-or-less realistic set for the scene they are about to reenact, Pirandello again highlights the backstage trickery that is necessary for the stage to produce its magic. The Step-Daughter’s insistence on finding the right furniture suggests that she is committed to strictly representing the reality of her experience, or else trying to wrest control of the narrative from the Father and the Manager (which she fails to do). The decorations she and the Father request—the mirror and screen—both overtly refer to vision, perspective, and identity. The mirror points to how the Characters gain a kind of self-awareness by putting on their show in front of the public and how the Actors and Manager see their own profession reflected in the Characters. The screen points to how the Step-Daughter’s identity is hidden from the Father during their hidden sexual encounter.
Themes
The Manager sits the Prompter down with “an outline of the scenes, act by act,” and asks him to bring paper and take down the action that is about to unfold in shorthand. He tells the Actors to clear the stage and “watch and listen” what transpires among the Characters, and wait to be given their parts. The Father is confused about the Manager’s plan, which is to have the Characters rehearse for the Actors, since “the characters don’t act” but are “in the ‘book’ […] when there is a ‘book’!” The Father protests that “the actors aren’t the characters,” and are in fact lucky enough to “have us [the Characters] alive before them.” The Manager asks if the Characters will “come before the public yourselves,” which would be “a magnificent spectacle,” but declares that they should not “pretend that [they] can act.”
The Prompter’s usual role is inverted: he goes from reading the script to writing it, just as the Manager transforms from director to audience. The Manager’s insistence that the Actors play the Characters points to the contradiction at the heart of the theater, a profession that believes truth is better reached through reenactments and distortions of reality than through reality itself. Now, with the Characters immediately available and able to author their own story, the tables are turned and acting becomes no longer necessary. But this kind of direct truth is incompatible with the Manager’s job.
Themes
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The Manager begins giving out the parts: the Second Lady Lead will be the Mother—her name is Amalia, the Father explains, but the Manager says they “don’t want to call her by her real name,” and the Father grows “more and more confused” before saying that his “own words sound false” to him. The Manager agrees to call the Mother “Amalia.” He has the Juvenile Lead play the Son and, “naturally,” the Leading Lady play the Step-Daughter, who bursts out in laughter and, offending the others, declare that she “can’t see [herself] at all in you [the Leading Lady].” The Father agrees, implying that the actors do not share “our temperaments, our souls,” but the Manager rejects the idea that “the spirit of the piece is in you [the Characters].” The Actors will “give body and form” to their “soul[s] or whatever you like to call it.”
The Father’s loss of confidence in the meaning of his own words points explicitly to how the Characters’ arrival confuses fiction and reality for everyone (but perhaps most of all the audience). Although earlier the Manager appeared as the defender of “reality” against the Characters’ bizarre fiction, now the Father champions “reality”: that of his and his family’s real lives over the distortions the Manager is planning for the stage. This question is left unresolved: it is unclear if actors need to share characters’ “temperaments [and] souls,” and there is no way for the audience (or the Manager or his Actors) to ever access the real “reality” behind the Characters’ experience. Rather, just as the Characters are themselves played by actors on stage, the story is only communicated through layers of testimony and retelling. As the story is contested by all the Characters, it is up to the audience to decide whom to trust.
Themes
The Father continues to protest, declaring that the Actors do not represent them. The Manager promises that “the make-up will remedy all that” and explains that “on the stage, you as yourself, cannot exist.” The Father complies: the Characters’ author “didn’t want to put us on the stage,” he admits, but he does not know who should play him. The Leading Man interrupts that it should be him, but he and the Father agree that “it will be difficult” for the Leading Man’s performance to resemble what the Father says he “inside of [him]self feel[s] [him]self to be.”
Bringing up the will of the Characters’ author, the Father at once recognizes and throws out the ordinary theory that an author controls the meaning of the stories they write. The Manager’s comments show how in stories—whether on the page or on the stage—Characters’ fundamental identities are disguised and only ever revealed partially. The point of literature and performance is not to directly state what characters “feel [themselves] to be,” but rather to offer a window into their identities through their actions, decisions, and interactions. The Father openly defies this norm by insisting on defining himself and his story.
Themes
The Manager cuts off the subject and asks the Step-Daughter if the scene of Madame Pace’s atelier is right. The Step-Daughter “do[es]n’t recognize the scene” but the Father agrees it is close enough. The Manager sends the Property Man to find an envelope to give to the Father.
Although the Father’s objection is never resolved, the Manager steps in to do what he does best: to continue moving the performance forward and decide when the Characters’ and Actors’ feelings are and are not worth the time and energy. In other words, he balances out the action onstage, and partially obscures the Characters’ true identities in the process.
Themes
The Manager declares it is time for the “First scene—the Young Lady.” The Leading Lady volunteers herself, but the Manager means the Step-Daughter, who prepares to act out the scene. He realizes Madame Pace is not present, and asks “what the devil’s to be done” about her absence.
It becomes clear that the Manager is preparing to stage the encounter between the Father and Step-Daughter, adding another metatheatrical layer by having the Characters from the story-within-a-play stage a performance of their own past (a play-within-a-theater-within-a-play).
Themes
The Father interrupts and asks for the Actresses’ hats and one of their mantles, which he hangs on the pegs that have been put up on the stage. He declares that, “by arranging the stage for her,” they can make Madame Pace appear—and she does. The “fat, oldish” Madame Pace walks down from the theater’s entrance, made-up and “dressed with a comical elegance in black silk.” The Step-Daughter declares that it is really her, the Father proudly agrees, and the Manager and Actors are first surprised and then offended by the Characters’ “vulgar trick.” The Father yells over them, asking why they prefer their “vulgar, commonplace sense of truth” over “this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself,” and which is “much truer than” all the actors anyway. Whoever acts out Madame Pace will be “less true than” the real Madame Pace.
Madame Pace’s inexplicable appearance defies all the laws of storytelling, which is the point: indeed, her appearance is Pirandello’s way of pointing out that the theater is founded on illusions. The Actors are offended because they work so hard to make stories come to life, when the Characters do it so easily. The Father also curiously points out that “the magic of the stage” is more real than the actors who create it, a sum greater than its parts or a truth expressed by means of illusion. At the same time as the Father lampoons the Actors for being mere imitators, Madame Pace herself looks like a caricature of a madam (brothel manager), so concerned with her appearance and dedicated to “elegance” that she appears “comical.” And by calling her into existence, the Father proves his capacity to act as an author, creating something out of nothing.
Themes
The Father announces that it is finally time for “the scene” to begin, but the stage directions note that “the scene between the Step-Daughter and Madame Pace has already begun […] in a manner impossible for the stage,” with Madame Pace holding the Step-Daughter’s chin and muttering quietly. This arouses the Actors’ ire, but the Step-Daughter tells them that “these aren’t matters which can be shouted.” The Manager asks them “to pretend to be alone” but the Step-Daughter wags her finger at him, warning that “someone” cannot hear Madame Pace’s words.
Just as soon as he has authored Madame Pace’s existence, the Father loses authorial control—and as soon as she has been conjured for the stage, Madame Pace violates its rules, acting “impossibl[y]” by insisting on privacy, talking so quietly that she cannot be heard by the audience (who never learns what she and the Step-Daughter are actually saying).
Themes
The Father explains that he is this “someone,” and that he has to wait outside. The Manager rejects this as against “the conventions of the theatre,” which requires “the scene between [the Step-Daughter] and [Madame Pace]” first. The Step-Daughter hastily explains that Madame Pace has been complaining about the Mother’s repairs to the Step-Daughter’s dress and explaining “that if I want her to continue to help us in our misery I must be patient.”
The Manager struggles to square the Characters’ desire for privacy with the theater’s demand to make everything public—even though the Step-Daughter is in fact trying to bring the scene closer to the reality of what took place between her, Madame Pace, and the Father.
Themes
In broken English—“half Italian, half Spanish” in the original Italian script but “half English, half Italian” here—Madame Pace declares she “no wanta take advantage of” the Step-Daughter, who begins laughing along with the actors at Pace’s “most comical” accent. Pace protests that she “trya best speaka English” and the Manager agrees to let her continue, which will “put a little comic relief into the crudity of the situation.” The Step-Daughter agrees: Pace’s commands feel like jokes, like when she asks the Step-Daughter to meet “an ‘old signore.’”
Madame Pace’s manipulative exploitation of the Mother and Step-Daughter contrasts with her “most comical” accent, which offers “a little comic relief” in Six Characters in Search of an Author as well as the future play the Manager is planning. Nevertheless, this is an utterly inappropriate and borderline cruel time for comic relief, because it is precisely when the audience is about to watch the horrific incest between the Father and Step-Daughter, which they already know brings the family together by destroying all of their lives in unison.
Themes
Literary Devices
Suddenly, the furious Mother lunges at Madame Pace—the Actors restrain her while she calls Pace an “old devil” and “murderess!” The Father and Step-Daughter try to calm the Mother down and protest that she and Madame Pace cannot be in the same room. The Manager says it “doesn’t matter” because they are just “sketch[ing]” the scene. He sits the Mother down, and the Step-Daughter and Madame Pace continue their conversation. Madame Pace refuses to “do anything witha your mother present” but the Step-Daughter insists on meeting “this ‘old signore’ who wants to talk nicely to me.” She sends Madame Pace away—Pace walks offstage “furious”—and directs the Father to make his entry and say “‘Good morning, Miss’ in that peculiar tone, that special tone…” The Manager protests that the Step-Daughter is usurping his role, but orders the Father to do what she asked.
Although the Characters are supposedly only reenacting previous events, the Mother reacts to Madame Pace with an understandable rage—in fact, it seems that actors are better suited for the theater because they lack the emotions of real characters, not because they can better embody them. (The Characters’ emotions lead them to pursue personal agendas over the collective task of their performance, which they frequently throw off-track as a result.) For the Manager and the Actors, then, the Characters are only offering a “sketch” of his play-in-the-making, while for the Characters this “sketch” means reliving their trauma (and for the audience it means looking behind rather than ahead, getting a “sketch” of the Characters’ backstory).
Themes
The Father begins acting his part, approaching the Step-Daughter, who hides her face behind her hat. He asks if she has “been here before” (she has), and then if he can remove her hat (she does herself). Meanwhile, the Mother watches “with varying expressions of sorrow, indignation, anxiety, and horror,” sometimes crying into her hands and yelling “my God!” The Father offers the Step-Daughter “a smarter hat” from among the Actors’ hats (one of them protests, but the Manager shuts her down and orders the action to resume). The Step-Daughter refuses the hat but the Father insists—she gestures to her black dress and he realizes that she is “in mourning.” He apologizes but she tells him not to.
The audience can’t experience this excruciating scene as fresh or suspenseful, given the information they already have from the Father and the Step-Daughter, as well as the Mother’s extreme reactions. Indeed, while the Mother’s reactions give life to the emotional toll of the Father and Step-Daughter’s sexual encounter, the Father and Step-Daughter themselves seem emotionless, having clearly lost the sexual interest and sense of mourning (respectively) that they are trying to reenact. This suggests that perhaps the Actors really could do better at making the scene come to life in a way that shows the audience its future emotional toll on the family.
Themes
The Manager interrupts the Step-Daughter and Father, telling the Prompter to “cut out that last bit” and stopping the action. Although the Step-Daughter protests that “the best’s coming now,” the Manager asks the Leading Man and Leading Lady to re-enact the scene so far, which they begin to do, although the stage-directions note that the reenactment is “quite a different thing, though it has not in any way the air of a parody.” When the Leading Man enters, the Father yells “No! no!” and the Step-Daughter erupts in laughter. They both complain about “the manner, the tone.”
The Manager’s intervention further spoils the scene for the audience, and the Leading Lady and Leading Man’s reenactment both forces the Characters to hold a mirror to their own actions and directly shows how the stage distorts reality. The Father cuts off the Actors just as the Manager cuts off the Characters, which furthers the parallels between these two figures (who act as, in a way, the primary “authors” of the Characters’ story throughout the play).
Themes
The Manager restarts the scene and directs the Leading Lady and Leading Man on how to act out the first encounter between the Father and the Step-Daughter, who laughs from the sidelines the whole way through. This infuriates the Leading Lady and Leading Man, and the Manager yells at the apologetic Step-Daughter, insisting that she doesn’t have “any manners” and is “absolutely disgusting.” The Father interjects, defending the Step-Daughter by repeating that the actors “are certainly not us.”
Playing the same role, the Step-Daughter and the Leading Lady clash over which of them embodies it legitimately. Interestingly, while the Step-Daughter’s frustrations are based on the Leading Lady’s acting, the Leading Lady complains about the Step-Daughter’s inability to behave herself like a proper audience member. The Step-Daughter denies the Leading Lady legitimate access to the truth, while the Leading Lady denies the Step-Daughter legitimate access to the theater.
Themes
The Manager again tries to continue the action, declaring that he “could never stand rehearsing with the author present,” because “he’s never satisfied!” The Step-Daughter promises to stop laughing. The Manager asks the Leading Man to tell the Leading Lady (playing the Step-Daughter) that he “understand[s]” her mourning and ask whom she is mourning for, but the Step-Daughter interrupts to declare that what really happened was the Father told her to “take off this little frock.” The Manager declares that this would “make a riot in the theatre!” but the Step-Daughter protests that “it’s the truth!” The Manager explains that this does not matter: for the theater, “truth up to a certain point, but no further.”
The Manager’s comment about the author—who is considered, in the time and place of this play, to be always a “he”—points to the interpretive work of the stage, which never simply reflects a written “story” but always modifies and translates it to a particular performance context. This is not proof that actors do not do justice to a work, but rather that a work is not bound to the wishes and desires of its author—just as the Characters, to their dismay, find their story neither told nor interpreted the way they want it to be. Given the Father’s persistent philosophizing, it is reasonable to think this also extends to the way people can never control the consequences of their actions in general. Beyond questioning the truth of the stage, here Pirandello questions the value of truth in the first place—and also gestures to the way social norms constrain and inform what he is capable of revealing in his plays (here, the level of detail he can show about the Father and Step-Daughter’s relationship).
Themes
The furious Step-Daughter declares that she refuses to let the Manager “piece together a little romantic sentimental scene out of [her] disgust” by letting the Leading Lady explain that her (the Step-Daughter’s) father (the Clerk) just died. Rather, the Leading Lady must do what she really did: take the Father “behind that screen, and with these fingers tingling with shame…”
The Father, Step-Daughter, and Manager all fight to determine the meaning of their story: the Father wants to appear as sympathetic as possible and make a public apology (or series of excuses), the Step-Daughter wants to expose the Father’s horrific behavior and her own resultant trauma, and the Manager simply wants the story to be riveting and scandalous—but not so scandalous as to break social norms—so that people will buy theater tickets.
Themes
The Manager interrupts again, explaining that “you can’t have this kind of thing on the stage,” even if it is true. The Step-Daughter threatens to leave and accuses the Manager of having “fixed it all up” with the Father, so that the Father’s “cerebral drama” gets to play itself out, but not the Step-Daughter’s part. The Manager protests that this risks the Step-Daughter’s character “becoming too prominent and overshadowing all the others.” Rather, the play must “pack them all into a neat little framework and then act what is actable.” It must “hint at the unrevealed interior life of each” character, instead of having them each “tell the public all [their] troubles in a nice monologue or a regular one hour lecture.” The Manager threatens that the Step-Daughter might “make a bad impression,” having “confessed to me that there were others before him at Madame Pace’s.”
Now, the Father, Step-Daughter, and Manager make their conflict over authorship explicit and the Manager explains why stories must gesture at rather than directly express the truths they hope to get across—as an author, he rejects truth for the sake of balance. Yet despite claiming to occupy a neutral position, the Manager also seems to defend the Father, especially when he threatens to retaliate against the Step-Daughter for her apparent moral deficits (even though she was cheated into being a prostitute and took the work to provide for her family). This supports the Step-Daughter’s suspicions that the Father and Manager are working together, using theater to hide the truth about and make excuses for the Father’s actions.
Themes
The Step-Daughter declares that “he who was responsible for the first fault is responsible for all that follow” which means all of her faults are the Father’s responsibility. She declares that, on the stage, the Father’s character cannot face his “noble remorses” unless he sleeps with the Step-Daughter and asks her the question that he really asked her while lying in her arms. The Mother “breaks out into a fit of crying” for a long time.
The Step-Daughter points out the ironic contradiction in the Father’s attempt to make amends by publicly re-committing his crime. At the same time, she clearly goes too far by blaming him for “all [the faults] that follow[ed]” his crime—although she might also be making a veiled reference to an earlier, incestuous crime that set their relationship in motion.
Themes
After the pause, the Step-Daughter asks the Manager if he wants to see what really happened. He says he does, and the Step-Daughter tells him to “ask that Mother there to leave us.” The Mother yells out, “No! No! Don’t permit it, sir, don’t permit it!” and explains that she “can’t bear it.” The Manager protests that the crucial moment “has happened already,” but the Mother declares that “it’s taking place now. It happens all the time.” And this, she explains, is why the two children (the Boy and the Child) do not talk—they cannot, and “they cling to me to keep my torment actual and vivid for me.” They have ceased to exist, she insists, and the Step-Daughter “has run away, and has left me, and is lost.”
Again, the Mother reacts to the Father and Step-Daughter as though they are really doing what they profess to be only re-enacting, and the lines between reality and performance grow even blurrier. While the Manager thinks in terms of his narrative, in which the climax “has happened already,” the Mother remains firmly rooted in her lived reality and cannot separate the Father and Step-Daughter’s “acting” from their real actions. Disturbingly, her exasperated declaration that “it happens all the time” suggests that the Father and Step-Daughter’s sexual relationship might not have ended with this initial encounter, which means that they are both lying throughout the play (and, indeed, might be intentionally working together and casting blame on each other to distract from their ongoing relationship). The Mother comments on the dramatic function of the Boy and Child, whose muteness reflects the way they are denied identity by the Father and Step-Daughter’s dominating role in the drama and violation of the foundational family taboo (as well as by the deaths that the other Characters have already predicted).
Themes
The Father announces that it is time for the Step-Daughter to castigate him “for that one fleeting and shameful moment of my life”—the Manager agrees, declaring that this event will be “the nucleus of the whole first act,” until the scene in which the Mother discovers what happened. The Father remarks that the Mother’s “final cry” is his “punishment,” and the Step-Daughter insists that “it’s driven men mad, that cry!” She remembers leaning on the Father’s chest, noticing one of the veins in her arm, feeling disgusted, and “let[ting her] head sink on his breast.” She acts this out and yells at the Mother to “Cry out as you did then!” The Mother pulls the Step-Daughter off the Father and calls the Manager a “brute!”
The Father seems to believe the play will give him the opportunity to perform remorse (even though he does not seem to actually feel it, but rather only rationalizes and excuses his errors away). In fact, this never happens: instead, he and the Step-Daughter merely show off their incestuous relationship even more grotesquely. The Father interprets the Mother’s pain as his own, and both re-traumatizes her and fails to recognize how he is again making her suffer for his own personal gain. For the Manager, too, the Mother’s suffering is a mere plot device—caught up in the illusions of the stage, everyone seems unable to see the Mother’s real agony.
Themes
Pleased, the Manager calls the scene “damned good” and declares “curtain here, curtain,” meaning that he would stop the action in his play at this point. The Machinist is confused and actually lowers the stage curtain, which covers everyone except the Manager and Father. The Manager comments that the Machinist is a “darned idiot” and explains the man’s mistake to the Father and the audience, before noting that at least he has found “the right ending” for the First Act of his play.
For the first time the curtain falls, although it is emptied of its usual meaning—there is no break in the action or real transition in the play’s theme, unlike between the First and Second Acts. The Machinist’s error again collapses the different layers of drama into one: the Characters’ play-within-a-play, the future play-within-a-play that the Manager is planning, and the play that the audience is watching all merge for a moment, with the Manager’s imagination suddenly slipping out of his control and transforming into reality.
Themes
Literary Devices
