pirandello six characters in search of an author

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). 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. But the Father argues that the very purpose of the theater is to bring fantasy to life, to challenge people’s concepts of 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. Pirandello also uses the theater itself to challenge the apparent division between fantasy and reality. 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.” So for the Characters, people are changing and mortal, while fictional characters are fixed and immortal. 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.

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. Indeed, the appearance of living, breathing characters challenges this binary from the start. 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. 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. 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 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. 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. 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.

Pirandello six characters in search of an author