Six Characters (1921)

Comedy is in which the creations of art and the reality of life are seen in turn as both
illusory and real. Rehearsal preparations of a theatrical company are interrupted by a Father and
his family who explain that they are characters from an unfinished dramatic work and ask
permission to reenact a crucial moment in their lives, a moment from which the actors can
fashion a finished play. The Father explains that, having found that his wife (the Mother) was in
love with another man, he had generously made it possible for the two to go off together. He
contends that he arranged for his own son to grow up healthily in the country and that he had
kept a kindly eye on the welfare of his wife, her lover, and the three illegitimate children born to
them-- the Stepdaughter, a Young Boy, and a Baby Girl-- until they disappeared from the city.
His wife challenges this interpretation of events and claims that the Father, tiring of her, had
forced her into the arms of another man and cruelly separated her from her legitimate son. Years
later, the Father continues, he failed to recognize the Stepdaughter in a young girl encountered in
Mme. Paces bawdy house; only the last-minute intervention of the Mother saved him from
dishonor. The actors who are to play the roles of Father and Stepdaughter now act out this crucial
scene in a manner that distorts and vulgarizes the incident. Objecting to the reenactment, the
Father explains that finding that the Mother and her illegitimate children were destitute-- the
lover having died-- he took them all to live with him and the Son. However, the Stepdaughter
continued to blame the Father for her shame, and the Son not only rejected him as a libertine but
refused to acknowledge his Mother or her three illegitimate children. Called upon to play the
scene in which he rejects the Mother, the Son refuses and runs into the garden where he finds the
Young Boy staring into a fountain at the drowned body of the Baby Girl. Suddenly a shot rings
out. The boy has killed himself and is carried into the wings amid the laments of the characters
and the nervous insistence of the actors that the situation is only make-believe. However, the
Father vehemently insists that the events they have witnessed are real. Caught in the
irreconcilable clash between day-to-day reality and the reality of art, the Manager of the
company bemoans a wasted day.

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 In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the characters lead an independent life because
their author failed to complete their story. They invade a rehearsal of another Pirandellian play
and insist upon playing out the life that is theirs. Constantly interrupting the stage manager and
the actors, disapproving narrow stage interpretations and insisting upon explaining themselves,
they break down the structure of the play until it becomes a series of alternately comic and tragic
fragments. Here Pirandello has, so to speak, written a play to end all plays. And all this comes
from the fact that life, with all its subjective complexity and irrationality, defies the glib
interpretations of the stage and its actors.

One character protests to the Manager and the actors: Of my nausea, of all the reasons,
one crueler and viler than another, which have made this of me, have made me just as I am, you
would like to make a sentimental, romantic concoction (Act II, 402). No naturalist could have
made a severer charge against formal dramaturgy. Moreover, the dramatis personae are
characters-- that is, they are stamped with certain characteristics which create their own
situations regardless of the intentions of their creator. When a character is born he acquires
immediately such an independence from his author that we can all imagine him in situations in
which the author never thought of placing him, and he assumes of his own initiative a
significance that his author never dreamt of lending him.

The drama which the six characters insist upon acting out in defiance of all contrivances
favored by the ordinary theatre is a nightmare of sordid situations and self-torment. The Father,
who came to believe that his gentle wife was more in rapport with his humble secretary than with
himself, set up a home for them. The family does not credit this motive and suspects that he
wanted to rid himself of his wife; and no doubt his motivation was more complex than he can
possibly understand or acknowledge. He kept the Son for himself, and the latter grew up into a
lonely embittered youth. After the clerks death, the Mother, who bore him three children,
disappeared with her new family, and the Father met his stepdaughter only years later in a
disreputable establishment. He was prevented from committing incest only because his wife who
saw the Father and the stepdaughter together warned them. The Father took the family back with
him, but since then their hearts have been consumed with shame, sorrow, and exasperation. The
legitimate Son rejects the presence of the Mothers illegitimate children, the Mother is passively

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miserable, her adolescent Boy broods upon suicide, the Father is constantly apologizing, and the
Stepdaughter cannot ever forgive him or overcome her disgust. Ultimately the Mothers youngest
child is drowned, the Boy shoots himself, and the characters run off from the stage in confusion.

Try and make a neat little play out of all this, Pirandello seems to say! This is life! The
tragedy of the six characters can never be completely dramatized because their motives are so
mixed; because some of them-- the Mother and the Son do not explain themselves sufficiently;
because others-- the youngest child and the Boy-- are inarticulate. Moreover, some of them are
too passionately eager to justify themselves and are too bedeviled to stay within the playwrights
frame. Many of the tendencies of the twentieth century-- its impatience with formal art, its
investigation of the nebulous but explosive unconscious and its relativist philosophy-- are caught
in this work. Six Characters in Search of an Author is as important as a monument to the
intellectual activity of an age as it is original and harrowing. And it is harrowing despite comic
details because Pirandellos puppets are intensely, if fragmentarily, alive. Only in some
unnecessarily metaphysical passages which produce more confusion than profundity can the play
be said to fall short of complete realization.

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There are actually seven characters, including Mme. Pace, the brothel keeper. The paradoxically
ludicrous situation of these six characters attempting to tell their story would be entirely comic if
Pirandello did not with considerable artistry and skill make us glimpse in the telling the
sufferings of these characters in their complicated relationships. That this inextricable mingling
of the grotesque and the sad, the humorous and the tragic, was an important part of Pirandellos
vision of life we know not only from his plays but also from his impressive treatise entitled
Humor (umorismo) published in 1908.

Let us briefly review some of the comic aspects of the play. To begin, the paradoxical
idea that characters have an independent existence apart from the author who conceives them,
can come upon a stage of their own volition, interrupt a rehearsal, demand to act out their
fragmentary story, and argue with live human beings the nature of personality and existence is a
magnificently comic paradox. Even the characters in their traits are from one aspect comic. The

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over-intellectual husband whose warped sense of integrity perhaps partially motivated his
handing over of his meek and peasant-like wife to a supposedly more congenial soul mate, the
husbands secretary, but who afterwards could not make a clean break away but hovers over the
new family like a mother-hen over a brood of goslings, is certainly in large part comic. With all
of his assumed dignity, sensitivity, and constant philosophizing, this intellectual, forced by the
common call of the lower animal nature, must resort to a brothel. The elder son of the mother
and the first husband is surely in his absurd and supercilious disdain of mother and her second
family entirely comic, even absurd. The elder daughter, with all of her loathing of the actions that
fate has thrust upon her, is nevertheless absurdly shrill in her desires to tell her story and to bring
remorse to the father. Even the mother, pathetic as she is made, has a large admixture of
absurdity in her character, especially in her relations to the elder son. The perplexities and
exasperations of the Manager and his constant frustrations by the characters are wholly
ludicrous, entirely laughable, though they give rise to serious arguments about such things as
personality and the nature of reality. In the same way, the contrasts between stage conventions
and the real, such as is represented for example, in the scene in which the actors attempt to
portray the characters is also fully comic, though again it is a loaded device whereby
Pirandello comments upon the differences between art and reality and takes satiric thrusts at the
romantic concoctions seemingly preferred by audiences. Even the absurd deaths of the two
children among the characters is lacking in the genuine seriousness of death and seem largely
incidents contrived to give the characters something to talk and be sad about. Certainly they
could not have been genuine deaths as we know death, for here these children are again, ready to
re-enact their stories. The very device that Pirandello uses of having the Manager constantly
question the Characters assertions that they are characters serves to give a comic twist to the
whole. Madam Pace and her dialect are, in the original Italian especially, wholly comic.

Characters having an Independent existence

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 The Father asserts that a character such as he is has more reality in that he has
definiteness and permanence than has a living personality which is constantly changing. As the
Father says in Act III:

The Father [with dignity, but not offended] A character, Sir, may always ask a man who
is. . .

The Manager Yes but you are asking these questions. . .

The Father But only in order to know if you. . .

. . . tomorrow? (Act III, 404)

Note the semantic shifts in words so characteristic of Pirandello in his enigmatic

treatments of personality and reality. A character is further a somebody in the Fathers
terms because it is the embodiment and epitome of one supreme passion. Yet the Father
recognizes the multiplicity in character when he insists that his whole being must not be
judged in terms of one aspect of his character uppermost in his conduct in the brothel. He
recognizes that there is himself as he sees himself and himself as the daughter sees him.
Through this and a variety of other characters in other plays Pirandello advanced the idea
of complex and changing character and raised the question of the centrality of the ego
amidst such constant flux.