Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

"Exactly, perfectly, to living beings more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes: beings less real perhaps, but truer! I agree with you entirely."

"Nowhere! It is merely to show you that one is born to life in many forms, in many shapes, as tree, or as stone, as water, as butterfly, or as woman. So one may also be born a character in a play."

"I marvel at your incredulity, gentlemen. Are you not accustomed to see the characters created by an author spring to life in yourselves and face each other? Just because there is no "book" [Pointing to the PROMPTER'S box.] which contains us, you refuse to believe"


"In the sense, that is, that the author who created us alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put us into a work of art."


"The Manager. That is quite all right. But what do you want here, all of you? The Father. We want to live. The Manager [ironically]. For Eternity? The Father. No, sir, only for a moment . . . in you."

the transfer to reality through ones imagination

"The Manager. And where is the "book"? The Father. It is in us! [The ACTORS laugh.] The drama is in us, and we are the drama. We are impatient to play it. Our inner passion drives us on to this."

the characters are inventing the stories

"But don't you see that 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."

"Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart. One gives way to the temptation, only to rise from it again, afterwards, with a great eagerness to re-establish one's dignity, as if it were a tombstone to place on the grave of one's shame, and a monument to hide and sign the memory of our weaknesses."

"Woman -- for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is the sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: "Blind yourself, for I am blind.""

"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."

"We act that rôle for which we have been cast, that rôle which we are given in life. And in my own case, passion itself, as usually happens, becomes a trifle theatrical when it is exalted."

we all play a role

"The Father. Then why not turn author now? Everybody does it. You don't want any special qualities. Your task is made much easier by the fact that we are all here alive before you . . . The Manager. It won't do. The Father. What? When you see us live our drama . . .
The Manager. Yes, that's all right. But you want someone to write it. The Father. No, no. Someone to take it down, possibly, while we play it, scene by scene! It will be enough to sketch it out at first, and then try it over."

they write the story. how an artist writes out his vision from something that already existed.

"What a joke it'll be for the others! But for you, alas! not quite such a joke: you who are real, baby dear, and really play by a real fountain that is big and green and beautiful, with ever so many bamboos around it that are reflected in the water, and a whole lot of little ducks swimming about . . ."

she isn't playing but existing

"The Father. Exactly! It will be difficult to act me as I really am. The effect will be rather -- apart from the make-up -- according as to how he supposes I am, as he senses me -- if he does sense me -- and not as I inside of myself feel myself to be. It seems to me then that account should be taken of this by everyone whose duty it may become to criticize us ."

characters explain themselves as characters

"The Father [irritated]. The illusion! For Heaven's sake, don't say illusion. Please don't use that word, which is particularly painful for us.. The Manager [astounded]. And why, if you please? The Father. It's painful, cruel, really cruel; and you ought to understand that. The Manager. But why? What ought we to say then? The illusion, I tell you, sir, which we've got to create for the audience . . . The Leading Man. With our acting. The Manager. The illusion of a reality. The Father. I understand; but you, perhaps, do not understand us. Forgive me! You see . . . here for you and your actors, the thing is only -- and rightly so . . . a kind of game ..."

that the actors reality is really fictional

"The Father [with dignity, but not offended]. A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his especial characteristics; for which reason he is always "somebody." But a man -- I'm not speaking of you now -- may very well be "nobody.""


"Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends, nor can ever end! Because if tomorrow it were to end . . . then why, all would be finished."

so they're always living in the essence of the moment. what would that be like?


do they resent the author?

is the son thereto provide contrast? which one is better between the two?

"The Son. Yes, but haven't you yet perceived that it isn't possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?"

without the son everything would have gone perfectly. they could have acted out their drama without him. why is he there?

"The Son [almost crying from rage]. What does it mean, this madness you've got? [They separate.] Have you no decency, that you insist on showing everyone our shame? I won't do it! I won't! And I stand for the will of our author in this. He didn't want to put us on the stage, after all!"

hes the truest manifestation of the author

'The Manager [pushing the ACTORS aside while THEY lift up the BOY and carry him off.] Is he really wounded? 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!'
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I had to read this for class, and usually when that happens, I end up hating the book. I couldn't help being intriguied by this one...so much so, that I ended up thinking about it throughout the day... What is reality, what is fiction?
This story is genius in its cleverness. For the first time, that I have read at least, it seperates the character completely from the author. Yes, I loved it when Gogol and Turgenev would say "shh don't disturb our hero", but this goes beyond that. It physically embodies the characters, and stresses the fact that they're alive. Throughout the whole play the characters insist that they are more alive than the actors. The Father is the most entertaining and philosophical characters out of all of them- he says something that is extremely astounding- that a character continues living in the imagination. "
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 word "matrix" is so symbolic because it signifies another real world, another universe. They just have to "find" one. He goes on to say, "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.." Imagine how flexible! Oh, the almost infinite number of different realms we humans tap into! And yet, it is also limited, for our imaginations are limited. The only difference being, characters can be "immortal" in as many limited minds as there are people.

And so, in the end, the characters are still limited: not only are they limited by their essence, but by their continuation as well. Their essence being, that they can only act the way they were created to act. They can't ever act in an unpredictable manner- something apart from themselves. They will always be only themselves. It is very interesting that they know themselves so well they start to explain their own actions. They know themselves so extensively that there is nothing else for them to discover.

The most interesting part about this story was the contrast between reality and fiction. The ending was just an echo of the whole story. The fact that these fictional beings wanted to be part of reality, and to try to teach the actors how to be "fictional" shows the constant play between these two realms. Which one is more real? Why is reality necessarily more real than the fiction, if everything is relative? And no, I'm not going to get into the whole "everything is what you want it to be" (crap). The Father says it clearly, "But only in order to know if you, as you really are now, see yourself as you once were with all the illusions that were yours then, with all the things both inside and outside of you as they seemed to you -- as they were then indeed for you. Well, sir, 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?" Our past is an illusion of our perceptions. Then, what part of us is really real? What part of our being has really happened? And is it truly real? These fictional beings make us question our own reality, and whether it is just as real as their lives. "Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist. For each one of us has his own reality to be respected before God, even when it is harmful to one's very self." We create our own reality, and therefore, in a way we are our own Authors, of our own fiction. We are actually the characters in our own fictional world. Hm, that's quite a revelation.

--
Published by Coyote Canyon Press (June 5, 2009)