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 debate about what is real, what is illusory, and whether people are themselves at all. Through the Characters’ confrontation with the Actors as well as the form of the play itself, Pirandello shows what happens when fantasy and reality collide and suggests they are not so different to begin with. The notions that the world people inhabit is “really real” and that people have fixed identities, Pirandello suggests, are simply subjective and psychologically colored interpretations of a much more complex, but ultimately unknowable, reality.
The central conflict between the Actors and the Characters is over which of them is “real.” The very formulation of this conflict inverts the usual relationship between reality and fantasy: both sides are trying to prove their reality in order to win the right to act out a fantasy. Indeed, the appearance of living, breathing characters challenges this binary from the start. The Father makes a succinct case for why he is more “real” than the Actors or Manager: whereas people change every day, characters are eternal and unchanging. As Pirandello puts it in his 1925 Preface to the play, one can read the same scene from literature 100,000 times and the characters will always do the same thing. So for the Characters, people are changing and mortal, while fictional characters are fixed and immortal. Indeed, the Father and Manager are in a sense playing out the ancient philosophical debate about whether ideas or material objects are the true “reality.”
Pirandello also uses the theater itself to challenge the apparent division between fantasy and reality. Echoing the audience’s likely reaction to the play, the Actors and Manager point out that they know intuitively that they live in the real world, and the Characters in a fictional one. But the Father argues that the very purpose of the theater is to bring fantasy to life, to challenge people’s concepts of reality. The Characters do this not only by showing up on the same plane of reality as the Actors, but also by repeatedly breaking the Fourth Wall: the Father and Step-Daughter give away the ending of the play and the Son calls himself “an ‘unrealized’ character, dramatically speaking,” analyzing his own role. The Actors, Characters, and stage crew also frequently shift roles, helping show that there are no clear boundaries between the story, the performance, and the real lives of everyone involved (including the audience). For instance, when the Characters begin their drama, the Leading Lady remarks, “we are the audience this time,” and the Prompter switches from giving the Actors their lines to copying down the Characters’ drama. The different plays-within-the-play also collapse into each other, making it impossible to tell what is “truth” and what is “fiction” by the end of the play. At one point, the Manager declares “curtain” to mark where he would end the First Act of his future play, but the Machinist misinterprets him and actually drops the curtain. And, at the very end of the play, the Child drowns in the fountain and the Boy shoots himself. No one can tell if this is the action of the play-within-the-play or the play itself, and the curtain falls as the Manager voices his confusion, leaving the audience even more deeply confused than the people they are watching on stage.
Ultimately, for Pirandello, there is no singular reality that can be transposed against a fixed realm of fantasy. Rather, through the Father, he argues that these concepts are relative and interrelated, based on individuals’ various interpretations of their experience and the world. The Father argues that everyone has a different picture of the world and only falsely believe they are understanding one another when they communicate through language. The Characters’ conflicting stories about what really happened among them and repeated insistence that the others are lying exemplify this vision of miscommunication, preventing the audience from ever learning if the story they see is the family’s “true” drama. The Father also argues that individuals are comprised of different conflicting personalities and asks not to be judged exclusively by his worst “self.” The play also repeatedly shows how people’s multiplicity gets in the way of recognizing their identities—the Father (presumably) does not recognize the Step-Daughter in Madame Pace’s brothel, and neither recognizes the Actors as embodying themselves. In the end, Pirandello does not make a claim about what is “really real” and what is mere illusion—rather, he aims to simply show that reality itself is an illusion, a framework imposed by individual minds on a world that does not neatly divide itself into real and unreal.
Given the play’s declaration that theater is “worthy of madmen” and Pirandello’s brazen indifference to theatrical norms, it is no surprise that the first production of Six Characters in Search of an Author raised a scandal and caused riots in the streets. By shining a light on the long periods of backstage trial and error that precede the polished performances actors finally put on for the public, Pirandello provocatively reveals his own profession as an elaborate magic trick. The Father’s lengthy philosophical monologues boldly and directly make this argument from another direction: “real” people, in the theater most of all, must stop insisting that theirs is the only reality. Indeed, through their outrage, Pirandello’s audience heeded this call, helping further blur the line between art and life: they shouted “Madhouse!” after the Manager and Father’s argument about which of their existences is “Madness,” and declared the play precisely what the Manager predicts at its beginning: a “glorious failure.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Reality, Illusion, and Identity ThemeTracker
Reality, Illusion, and Identity Quotes in Six Characters in Search of an Author
Ridiculous? Ridiculous? Is it my fault if France won’t send us any more good comedies, and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello’s works, where nobody understands anything, and where the author plays the fool with us all?
“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?
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.
No, excuse me, I meant it for you, sir, who were crying out that you had no time to lose with madmen, while no one better than yourself knows that nature uses the instrument of human fantasy in order to pursue her high creative purpose.
The author who created us alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put us into a work of art. And this was a real crime, sir; because he who has had the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. He cannot die. The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die. And to live for ever, it does not need to have extraordinary gifts or to be able to work wonders. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? Yet they live eternally because—live germs as they were—they had the fortune to find a fecundating matrix, a fantasy which could raise and nourish them: make them live for ever!
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.
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.
For the drama lies all in this—in the conscience that I have, that each one of us has. We believe this conscience to be a single thing, but it is many-sided. There is one for this person, and another for that. Diverse consciences. So we have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn’t true. We perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended, caught up in the air on a kind of hook. Then we perceive that all of us was not in that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed.
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!
Acting is our business here. Truth up to a certain point, but no further.
On the stage you can’t have a character becoming too prominent and overshadowing all the others. The thing is to pack them all into a neat little framework and then act what is actable. I am aware of the fact that everyone has his own interior life which he wants very much to put forward. But the difficulty lies in this fact: to set out just so much as is necessary for the stage, taking the other characters into consideration, and at the same time hint at the unrevealed interior life of each. I am willing to admit, my dear young lady, that from your point of view it would be a fine idea if each character couldtell the public all his troubles in a nice monologue or a regular one hour lecture (good humoredly). You must restrain yourself, my dear, and in our own interest, too; because this fury of yours, this exaggerated disgust you show, may make a bad impression, you know. After you have confessed to me that there were others before him at Madame Pace’s and more than once…
The darned idiot! I said “curtain” to show the act should end there, and he goes and lets it down in earnest (to the Father, while he pulls the curtain back to go on to the stage again). Yes, yes, it’s all right. Effect certain! That’s the right ending. I’ll guarantee the first act at any rate.
The illusion! For Heaven’s sake, don’t say illusion. Please don’t use that word, which is particularly painful for us.
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…?
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?
Authors, as a rule, hide the labour of their creations. When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him; and he has to will them the way they will themselves—for there’s trouble if he doesn’t. When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.
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!
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.
