Response to "Six Characters"

Pirandello's play "Six Characters in Search of and Author," is an allegory for the artistic form of the dramatic play itself.  The structure of the play is self-referential with multiple levels that place reflections upon each other. Of these reflections, some of the most evident are those cast by the actors and the Characters as they stand vis-a-vis on the stage.  Here Pirandello has the separate realities of the sub-groups unfold, presenting the play's central conflict: "the illusion of reality" (Pirandello, Act 2, pg. 54).

In Act One, the Father makes clear his qualms about acting: "I say that it may well be considered a madness...to force the opposite process; to create credible situations so that they may appear true" (Act One, pg. 12).  For him, acting as an art form is a game--one which undermines the reality of the characters.  Immortal in their creation, the conflict between the Director and Actors and the Characters is one of perceptibility: "And how can we understand one another if in the words I speak I put the meaning and the value of things as I myself see them, while the one who listens inevitability takes them according to the meaning and the value that he has in himself of the world he has inside of himself" (Act One, pg. 19).  Believing the form of the character to be of a separate form of nature--separate from that of human, even--the Father is repulsed by the Director's use of the word "illusion."  Here, Pirandello questions the reality of the Actors versus the reality of the Characters.  For this, the Father offers this explanation: "if we have no other reality beyond the illusion, it would be also a good idea for you not to trust in your own reality, the one you breathe and feel today within yourself, because--like that of yesterday--it is destined to reveal itself as an illusion tomorrow" (Act Two, pg. 56).  The Father concludes that because the reality of the Character is unchangeable--static in its form--it therefore more real than the reality of the Actor or Human, which is subject to changes in time.