Six Characters in Search of an Author

by

Luigi Pirandello

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Action, Fate, and Absurdity Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Reality, Illusion, and Identity Theme Icon
Authorship and Meaning Theme Icon
Action, Fate, and Absurdity Theme Icon
The Nuclear Family Theme Icon
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.
Action, Fate, and Absurdity Theme Icon

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 existentially stuck, lacking an author but somehow full of detailed knowledge about how their story will end. Like actors onstage, they dutifully fulfill this fate, which is at once completely foreknown and completely shocking to both of their audiences—the Actors who are supposed to play them and the ticketholders filling the theater. They confront circumstances that at once make no sense and cannot possibly be avoided—in other words, they find themselves powerless before fate and nature, which they submit to against and despite their judgment, understanding, and desire to change.

The Characters step into an ambiguous world where things happen for no reason. The Characters’ mysterious appearance does not only embody this principle; the Characters themselves also espouse it. One of the first things the Father says is that “life is full of infinite absurdities” that are true nevertheless, and he later pontificates that “one is born to life in many forms,” including that “one may also be born a character in a play.” The Characters continue to show off the apparent absurdity of their existence when the Step-Daughter introduces herself cryptically, by insulting her brother (the Boy) and singing and dancing to a French song. The end of the play is also inexplicable and mechanical—the audience never learns why the Child drowns and the Boy shoots himself, nor whether the Boy killed the Child or all these events are related to the rest of the family’s history of conflict and trauma.

Despite the meaninglessness of their lives and suffering, the Characters are bound to their fate, of which they themselves are the orchestrators. The Manager and the Actors reference this from the very beginning of the play, when they are rehearsing “Mixing It Up” and the Manager explains that the message of the play is the Leading Man’s character “becom[ing] the puppet of [him]self.”

The Characters are well aware of what they will do, even though they recognize it as horrible: during the First Act, the Step-Daughter and Father both explicitly say that they will have a sexual encounter, and then the Child and Boy will die. Indeed, the Father blames “the complicated torments of my spirit” for all his family’s problems: even though they are the agents of their own destruction and fully aware of this throughout the play, the Characters are fully unable to stop it. The Father repeatedly insists that, although he spent his whole life trying to achieve “moral sanity” (to live sensibly and benevolently), he ultimately had to admit that “evil […] may spring from good,” such as how he destroyed his family despite his intelligence and best intentions.

The Father’s philosophizing shows the role of thinking, reason, and art in relation to the meaninglessness of life: these faculties and products of mind allow people to make sense of their lives and their lack of control over their fates. But while people try to make the world and its events rational, ultimately they never can, and reason only operates in retrospect. The Father insists that his relentless theorizing is his way of “crying aloud the reason of [his] sufferings.” The others criticize the Father for thinking he “has got the meaning of it all,” and he twists this, arguing that he is trying to create “a meaning and a value” in his otherwise meaningless life. The Father is fully aware that his analysis does nothing, and yet he continues performing it: he believes that a word, phrase, or saying “tells us nothing and yet calms us” in a time of crisis. Even though he knows it is fleeting, he seeks meaning through reason in order to try and comfort himself in a world that he realizes has no inherent meaning. In contrast to the Father’s philosophical monologues, the Mother responds to her family’s crisis by suffering acutely and silently. Although she is much less of an annoyance to the rest of the people in the theater, she clearly also fares worse than the Father, whose analysis helps alleviate his pain.

The Father’s philosophizing is inevitable, his way of responding to life’s absurdity and making sense of his suffering, but it is also useless: it does nothing to concretely change his situation or his family’s animosity toward him. They repeatedly tell him this, and the Manager interrupts him over and over by noting that his philosophizing does nothing to advance their immediate project: putting on a drama. There is no doubt that this condition is Pirandello’s metaphor for the human condition at large: things happen, and people rush to explain them but inevitably fall short—and fall victim to the next inexplicable occurrence that their moral reckoning does little to prevent.

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Action, Fate, and Absurdity ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Action, Fate, and Absurdity appears in each act of Six Characters in Search of an Author. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Action, Fate, and Absurdity Quotes in Six Characters in Search of an Author

Below you will find the important quotes in Six Characters in Search of an Author related to the theme of Action, Fate, and Absurdity.
Act 1 Quotes

“The empty form of reason without the fullness of instinct, which is blind.”—You stand for reason, your wife is instinct. It’s a mixing up of the parts, according to which you who act your own part become the puppet of yourself. Do you understand?

Related Characters: The Manager (speaker), The Leading Man, The Leading Lady
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 2
Explanation and Analysis:

A tenuous light surrounds them, almost as if irradiated by them—the faint breath of their fantastic reality.
This light will disappear when they come forward towards the actors. They preserve, however, something of the dream lightness in which they seem almost suspended; but this does not detract from the essential reality of their forms and expressions.

Related Characters: The Manager, The Father, The Step-Daughter, The Mother, The Son, The Boy, The Child, The Door-Keeper
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

The whole trouble lies here. In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do. Look here! This woman (indicating the Mother) takes all my pity for her as a specially ferocious form of cruelty.

Related Characters: The Father (speaker), The Manager, The Step-Daughter, The Mother
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

Oh, all these intellectual complications make me sick, disgust me—all this philosophy that uncovers the beast in man, and then seeks to save him, excuse him… I can’t stand it, sir. When a man seeks to “simplify” life bestially, throwing aside every relic of humanity, every chaste aspiration, every pure feeling, all sense of ideality, duty, modesty, shame… then nothing is more revolting and nauseous than a certain kind of remorse—crocodiles’ tears, that’s what it is.

Related Characters: The Step-Daughter (speaker), The Manager, The Father
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:

The drama consists finally in this: when that mother re-enters my house, her family born outside of it, and shall we say superimposed on the original, ends with the death of the little girl, the tragedy of the boy and the flight of the elder daughter. It cannot go on, because it is foreign to its surroundings. So after much torment, we three remain: I, the mother, that son. Then, owing to the disappearance of that extraneous family, we too find ourselves strange to one another. We find we are living in an atmosphere of mortal desolation which is the revenge, as he (indicating Son) scornfully said of the Demon of Experiment, that unfortunately hides in me.

Related Characters: The Father (speaker), The Manager, The Step-Daughter, The Mother, The Son, The Boy, The Child
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 2 Quotes

And they want to put it on the stage! If there was at least a reason for it! He thinks he has got at the meaning of it all. Just as if each one of us in every circumstance of life couldn’t find his own explanation of it! (Pauses.) He complains he was discovered in a place where he ought not to have been seen, in a moment of his life which ought to have remained hidden and kept out of the reach of that convention which he has to maintain for other people. And what about my case? Haven’t I had to reveal what no son ought ever to reveal: how father and mother live and are man and wife for themselves quite apart from that idea of father and mother which we give them?

Related Characters: The Son (speaker), The Father, The Mother
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:

Excuse me, all of you! Why are you so anxious to destroy in the name of a vulgar, commonplace sense of truth, this reality which comes to birth attracted and formed by the magic of the stage itself, which has indeed more right to live here than you, since it is much truer than you—if you don’t mind my saying so? Which is the actress among you who is to play Madame Pace? Well, here is Madame Pace herself. And you will allow, I fancy, that the actress who acts her will be less true than this woman here, who is herself in person. You see my daughter recognized her and went over to her at once. Now you’re going to witness the scene!

Related Characters: The Father (speaker), The Step-Daughter, Madame Pace
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Act 3 Quotes

The FATHER. Can you tell me who you are?
The MANAGER (perplexed, half smiling). What? Who am I? I am myself.
The FATHER. And if I were to tell you that that isn’t true, because you are I…?

Related Characters: The Manager (speaker), The Father (speaker)
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:

If you think of all those illusions that mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don’t even seem to you to exist any more, while once they were for you, don’t you feel that—I won’t say these boards—but the very earth under your feet is sinking away from you when you reflect that in the same way this you as you feel it today—all this present reality of yours—is fated to seem a mere illusion to you tomorrow?

Related Characters: The Father (speaker), The Manager
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 43-4
Explanation and Analysis:

I’m not philosophizing: I’m crying aloud the reason of my sufferings.

Related Characters: The Father (speaker), The Manager
Page Number: 45
Explanation and Analysis:

The SON (to Manager who stops him). I’ve got nothing to do with this affair. Let me go please! Let me go!
The MANAGER. What do you mean by saying you’ve got nothing to do with this?
The STEP-DAUGHTER (calmly, with irony). Don’t bother to stop him: he won’t go away.
The FATHER. He has to act the terrible scene in the garden with his mother.
The SON (suddenly resolute and with dignity). I shall act nothing at all. I’ve said so from the very beginning (to the Manager). Let me go!

Related Characters: The Manager (speaker), The Father (speaker), The Step-Daughter (speaker), The Son (speaker), The Mother
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:

SOME ACTORS. He’s dead! dead!
OTHER ACTORS. No, no, it’s only make believe, it’s only pretence!
The FATHER (with a terrible cry). Pretence? Reality, sir, reality!
The MANAGER. Pretence? Reality? To Hell with it all! Never in my life has such a thing happened to me. I’ve lost a whole day over these people, a whole day!
Curtain.

Related Characters: The Manager (speaker), The Father (speaker), The Boy, The Child
Related Symbols: The Curtain
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis: