Reality, Illusion, and Identity
Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author breaks down the ordinarily straightforward boundaries between fantasy and reality, art and life, and others and the self. His Characters know they are characters and ask what this means for themselves—even though doing so requires violating the fundamental rules of the play’s fictional universe. The lead Character, the Father, even declares that the Characters are more real than the Actors, which sets off a protracted…
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Authorship and Meaning
In his Preface to the 1925 version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello revealed that the six Characters at the heart of the play were his own creations, and that he was the author who abandoned them more than a decade earlier after failing to place them in an adequate story. But they took on a life of their own and began to haunt him while he worked on other…
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Action, Fate, and Absurdity
Six Characters in Search of an Author is often cited as an important influence on a whole generation of post-World War Two playwrights famous for “Theatre of the Absurd”: plays that cope with the difficulty of making meaning out of an apparently meaningless world, especially in a modern society where people have lost the fixed moral codes previously enforced by religion, just as Pirandello’s characters are “abandoned” by their author. The Characters enter the play…
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The Nuclear Family
It is telling that the drama embodied by Pirandello’s Characters, which on the surface might seem only tangentially relevant to the point of the play as a whole, is fundamentally about marriage, family, and gender. More specifically, it concerns the Characters’ continual attempts—and consistent failures—to establish a functional household, to fulfill the ideal of the nuclear family that promises to resolve their conflicts and restore them to a stable, happy harmony. In a sense, they…
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