In Context: Six Characters in Search of an Author

The split between the “Actors” and the “Characters” in Six Characters seems at first to represent a division between “reality” and “illusion.” Yet, the “real” actors are specialists in achieving illusion, and the characters claim with some justification to be more “real” than reality. Like the modernists who celebrated the power of myth to transform the everyday, Pirandello celebrates the theater, which reveals the element of self-dramatization inherent in the roles people play in everyday life. Although their story contains a heavy dose of melodrama and therefore seems “unrealistic,” Pirandello does not simply treat the Characters with irony. Rather, he seems to celebrate the greater intensity of their dramatic self-representation as the basic impulse behind art. –Pericles Lewis