47 pages • 1 hour read
Six Characters in Search of an Author
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Themes
Authorship and the Artwork
Giving form to a story is both a literary art and something we do with our lives to create meaning. The play explores both ideas of authorship in different ways. The premise of the play is that the characters are searching for a playwright to author their play because “the author who created [them] alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put [them] into a work of art” (5). The absence of the author allows Luigi Pirandello to consider what happens to a creation when it is out of the author’s control. While the author, “the instrument of the creation,” will “die,” the “creation does not die (5, 6). The Manager, named the author of the character’s drama, is left in charge of the story, but in the end, he loses control of the creation. This loss of control reflects the author’s inability to completely control a work.
Throughout the play, the Father, the Step-Daughter, and the Manager attempt to act as the author of the play. The Father argues for a more philosophical type of authorship. He espouses many ideas that explain and contextualizes his actions. The Step-Daughter authors a story that is driven by emotion and spectacle: She seeks to make her trauma visible to her audience. Factual accuracy is key to her storytelling. The Manager adheres to the conventions of theater: He follows decorum, wants a linear story, and uses cliched dialogue. Their conflicting authorship styles lead to many conflicts that interrupt the rehearsal of the drama. It also leads to variations in the same stories. For example, the Father and the Step-Daughter disagree about whether the Mother arrived “just” or “[a]lmost” in time to stop it (15). Authorship becomes a way of validating and favoring a particular perspective.
Even when a character tries to abdicate authorship, they are not divorced from the story. The Son will take “[n]o action” in this story (17). As an “‘unrealized’ character” (17), the Son feels he does not contribute to the story. Yet asserting his unimportance is already an act of authorship and self-definition. He justifies his actions by referring to the author’s abandonment of the characters and their drama. Not finishing or staging the drama, he says, is “the will of our author” because he “didn’t want to put us on the stage, after all” (51). In his effort to not participate, the Son reveals that whether authorship is active or inactive, the story will still be told.
Identity and Representation
The difference between the actors and the characters shows the nuances of identity formation. When the actors begin to play the characters, their performances are “quite a different thing, though it has not in any way the air of parody” (34). The Step-Daughter and the Father are “not able to recognize themselves” (34). While trying to play the characters, the actors “deliver their words in different tones and with a different psychology, express, sometimes with smiles, sometimes with gestures” (34). The Step-Daughter reacts strongly. She laughs and rejects the representation of herself and says that Leading Lady isn’t “in the least like” the Step-Daughter (34).
The characters debate the relative importance of a person’s actions and their effects versus a multiplicity of discrete moments for understanding personal identity. The Step-Daughter defines the Father by his actions—by one in particular: He solicited her for sexual favors, whether wittingly or not. The Father argues that a person’s identity is not “a single thing, but it is many-sided” (16). A person is “unique in all our acts” and creates a different identity for each person they meet (16). Because of the fluidity and multiplicity of identity, the Father argues that it is an “atrocious injustice to judge” the Father for one action. If identity is infinitely complex, this would explain why the actors could never fully represent the characters, as they try to capture the characters in just one moment.
Names are an important part of one’s personal identity, yet most of the characters in Six Characters are not given a name. By using titles to refer to each character, the characters become generalized tropes without specific, personal identities. Two of the characters are given names: The Child and the Mother. The Step-Daughter calls the Child Rosetta at the beginning of the second act. Rosetta recalls the fragility of a flower, foreshadowing her tragic death. The name becomes a term of endearment as the Step-Daughter tries to come to terms with the Child’s fate. The Father reveals that the Mother’s name is Amalia. The Manager underscores the importance of names to identity when he objects to using “the real name” of the Mother because they ”don’t want to call [the character] by [the Mother’s] real name” (25). Names represent a person, so these two different beings need different names.
An audience becomes a mirror for a person’s identity. This audience could be a traditional theatrical audience that watches and reacts to a play. Throughout the play, different groups of characters act as the audience to evaluate and react to the different performances. The actors watch the characters and re-enact “the impression they receive” (34). The distorted reflections in the actors’ performances are criticized and laughed at by the characters. The Son describes how the variations in the performances of identity “throw[ a] likeness back at [them] with a horrible grimace” (50). Because of the multiplicity of identities and the variations in one’s self, trying to capture an identity flattens, reduces, and distorts it.
The (Un)Reality of Theater
Pirandello uses the distinction between theater and real life to discuss ideas about reality and truth. The metatheatricality of the play draws attention to the artifice and construction of the whole show itself, reminding the reader of its pretense. Theater only tells the “[t]ruth up to a certain point” (37). Theater, as expressed by the Manager, never seeks to represent real life exactly. Whether it be the props, the set, or the dialogue, theater is crafted to tell a story.
But for the characters, this drama is also their life. The characters “have no other reality outside of this illusion” created by the play (42). The performance, to be real for them, should be accurate. For the Father, this means letting the characters play their own parts. For the Step-Daughter, it means representing everything onstage exactly as it was. While fictional, these characters stand in for people in contrast to the actors’ characters.
The distinction between theater and real life is also a platform for considering fate versus free will. For the characters, the construction, conventions, and limits of the theater act as a sort of predetermined fate that does not reflect their experiences as living beings. Yet, these experiences are also flattened through being relived and repeated: The Mother lives in the “eternal moment” of her suffering (39), and the Son is “unable to move” and “has to remain” despite what he wants (49). The characters’ inability to leave or change their fates suggests the inherent fixity of their identities as characters, while their self-consciousness causes them to yearn for freedom.
The truth of theater is especially prominent in the play’s ending. For the characters, the torture is real. The Father describes “with a terrible cry” that it is “reality” (52). The Mother runs to the dead children with “a cry of terror” (52). The play’s audience, though, is aware that all the characters onstage are acting. But the actors and the Manager live in the blurring between these two worlds. They are unable to distinguish if it is “only make believe” or reality (52). This uncertainty underscores Pirandello’s interrogation of theater as a truth-telling artform.
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