What Pirandello seems to accomplish throughout this book is
proving that characters are not mindless two-dimensional characters. They have
a story, a background. They are going through the same drama that the readers
who read this work are. He is making the characters jump of the page in a
matter of speaking.
The father
states, “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.” In this quotation, the father is debating that the characters
do have a reality and this should be noted while watching and participating the
play. The stage is a place for expression, but it is a place for expression
that reflects a true reality.
The second
line of the father’s speech argues that a man is real and the character is in
fact somebody, but his character’s actual reality is not real. While the character
is on stage he adopts a made up reality. His eternity is fixed because it was
written before. The overarching idea to this is that this man starts to live in
his own world creating his fate whereas the character lives inside art, which
is always timeless and universal.
The family’s
drama can be looked at through the quote above. The woman is the father’s daughter
and together they had a son. This immediately creates controversy and essentially
a great dramatic story. The mother is denying her fate and what has happened to
her and is trying to live in this world of art where it doesn’t become actual
reality. The mother declares that she and the son are always alone and living
in the shadows. Again the father gives a speech about the essence of life and
the man or in this case woman.
In the
majority of the father’s sermons he wants to explain to this cast of characters
that these characters have an illusion of being a person but this illusion is
not true. People perceive a better illusion of their life when they are in
tragic situations. People put so much emphasis on this one act or situation to
the severity that it explains and defines their entire lives. This is not true.
This is one main idea to this book and if the reader does not understand the
difference between man and character, stage and society, reality and illusion
then the whole book means nothing.
The distinction made between the Actors and the Characters is by far the play's most emphasized theme. I'm not quite sure what you mean when you say that the Characters are going through the same drama that we as readers are. If anything, Pirandello is claiming that the struggle of a man and a character are completely different, a statement that you make later in your argument. I struggled with the line "...a man...can be nobody (55). Is the Father envious of man's ability to be nobody, or is he criticizing man? It seems that you believe that the Characters are split between living lives as Characters and lives as human, where to me, I read their struggle as being singular: they are stuck in their lives as Characters, unable to make themselves subject to time or other natural and universal occurrences. In this way, they are lost--"floating", if you will. This would make it so that while man can chose to be nobody, a Character without and author is undeniably nobody--suffering from his "immutable reality" (56). I would also have liked to see the word illusion defined as you've used it here, only because it is another one of those concepts in the book that really puzzled me.
ReplyDeleteI think the main theme Pirandello wants to get across is that we do not really know what is real and what is fiction. In the play the 'Characters' are viewed by the actors as individuals who have been made up; a creation. But, if you really think about it the 'Actors' themselves are also just characters. Both are being perceived by an outside audience. I feel the message Pirandello is trying to send is that we, people in general, can never really know if life is an illusion or if it is not. Are we being viewed by audience? This question is absurd and would be considered madness but how can we know for certain?
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