Six+Characters+in+Search+of+an+Author


 * __Introduction: __**

//Six Characters in Search of an Author//, written by Luigi Pirandello deals with reality and illusion. Along with existentialism, Absurdism, Theatre of the Absurd, and Albert Camus, plays a part in //Six Characters//. //Six Characters// deals with trial and tribulations of a family lost in time is forced to relive the most horrible moments of their lives until they can find a way to complete their story.

**__Pirandello:__ **

Luigi Pirandello was born in Girgenti, Sicily to an upper-class family, with parents Stefano and Caterina Ricci Gramitto on June 28, 1867. Both parents had well-to-do backgrounds and they were involved in the sulfur industry. He studied philology at Rome and at Bonn and wrote a dissertation on the dialect of his native town (1891). From 1897 to 1922, he was professor of aesthetics and stylistics at the Real Istituto di Magistere Femminile at Rome (3). Pirandello, an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934. Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories and about 40 plays. Pirandello showed how illusion mixed with reality and how people saw things in a different way. For Pirandello, reality was both true and false and words are unreliable. Pirandello's tragic plays are often seen as forerunners for Theatre of the Absurd, and have even become a category within the Theatre of the Absurd genre – Pirandellism.

In 1894, Pirandello had married Antonietta Portulano, a Sicilian and the daughter of an business associate of his father. She suffered mental breakdown in 1904. As her condition worsened, she became insane with a jealous paranoia. Her illness deeply influenced Pirandello's writing. After his wife's illness got worse, he was forced to place her in a mental institution in 1919.During World War I, both of Pirandello's sons were captured as prisoners of war. When the collapse of the sulfur mines destroyed the family business, Pirandello had to turn his writing into a financially profitable activity. In 1904, Pirandello gained his first literary success with the novel //IL FU MATTIA PASCAL//

**__Characters:   __** __The Father __: The father is originally married to the mother. During their marriage he strongly advises that they send the son off to the country. After he finds out the mother is having an affair he suggests she leaves him for her lover. It is not exactly known; but, the father may have had a sexual tryst with the stepdaughter before he knew who she was. After the mother’s lover dies he brings the family back to live with him. Both he and the stepdaughter are insistent on how the characters are staged.¹ __The Mother__: Her real name is Amalia. The mother is originally married to the father. She has an affair with an employee of the father’s. She had the son with the father and the other children with her lover. The mother is dressed in all black and wearing a veil in mourning of the death of her lover. Through the mother grief is represented in __Six Characters in Search of an Author__. ¹ __The Son__: The son is born weak and the father sends him off to the country to try and become stronger. Because of this he hates his family and does not even consider the stepdaughter, the boy, or the little girl a part of his family. During the play the son seems embarrassed of his family and believes he is an unknown character in the play.¹ The son witnesses the death of both the boy and the little girl. __The Stepdaughter__: A beautiful seductive young woman who worked in a brothel. Wants to revenge herself by continuously repeating the events her and the father went through, this action shows her cruelty. Both her and the father are insistent on how the characters are staged.¹ The stepdaughter has a hatred for both the son and boy. She dislikes the son because of how he treats the other siblings and the boy because he allowed the little girl to drown as well as shooting himself². __The Boy__: The boy is mute and timid. He is also dressed in all black for mourning. The boy is more just an accessory to the mother and keeps her torture real.¹ He kills himself by gunshot towards the end of the play. __The Little Girl__: Similar to the boy the little girl is also mute. She also is an accessory to the mother in keeping her torture real.¹ The little girl dies in the play as well; she is playing in the fountain and drowns. One reason the little girl could be dressed in all white is to represent innocence since she is meant to stand for the fallen innocent. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">__The Director__: The director is quick to anger but not very bright. By the end of the play he cannot decide if the six characters are actually real or not. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">__Madame Pace__: Madame Pace is an older overweight woman that wears too much makeup. She has puffy “oxygenated” hair. In the play, Pace is an apparition. She is the stepdaughter’s employer.

**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Synopsis: __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">The play starts out with an empty stage and actors and a director getting ready to start their rehearsal when six characters walk onto stage in search of a new author. The characters say they are incomplete because the author could not finish his work. Soon the stepdaughter and father begin to tell their story. The father was married to the Mother but when he found out she loved his assistant he let her go. The Son is their child but the Father has sent him to the country in order to become strong. The Stepdaughter, the Little Boy, and the Child are all children that the Mother had with her lover (the Father’s assistant). The assistant dies and the mother moves back. After moving back the stepdaughter begins working in a brothel for Madame Pace and the Father came in. It is not stated if the two had sex, but the audience is led to believe that they stop before it gets too far. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">After hearing the family’s story the Director has his actors try to act it out to which the stepdaughter finds amusing because she believes they are not acting it out the way it really happened. The Father and Stepdaughter begin to re-enact the scene but the Director censors a line of the Stepdaughter’s about disrobing. She then believes that the Director is collaborating with the Father of making sure he is flattered and misrepresents the truth. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">In the last act the Little Boy and the Child die. The Son starts to tell his story of seeing the Little Boy watching the Child drown in the fountain. As everyone is listening to the Son’s story there is a sudden shot. The characters and actors see that the Little Boy has shot himself. The Mother runs over to the Little Boy along with several actors and carries him off stage. No one can agree if he is actually dead or if it is just an illusion. The Director in frustration exclaims a whole day of rehearsal has been lost. The play ends with a picture of the “characters,” first in shadow with the Little Girl and Little Boy missing, and then in a trio of Father, Mother, and Son with the Stepdaughter laughing maniacally and exiting the theatre.

**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Revised Version of Six Characters : __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt 19.5pt;">There was a revised version of Six Characters in Search of an Author at Rockhurst University that brought the 1920’s play into modern times. Instead of the six characters interrupting a play rehearsal, the characters walk into a film studio where Jay, the producer, is working on a documentary about a children’s hospice center. The characters have been searching since the 1920’s (when the play was written and first staged) for an author who could finish their stories. The characters followed the film crew from the hospice center to the studio by means of entering into the film itself. While Jay, the producer, admits that she is not an author and only writes scripts for the reenactment scenes in her documentary, the characters are convinced that she is the author who could help them. Jay agrees to help them finish their story by creating a drama documentary with actors to reenact their tale (the relationships between the characters remains the same as they were in the original version).The father and stepdaughter immediately begin interrupting and scrutinizing the inadequacy of the actors performance. Soon the father and the stepdaughter begin to reenact the scene themselves and Jay soon begins to film. In this modern version, Pace is not a Madame, but a sleazy pimp who runs the hat shop that the mother works in. Pace soon enters the scene telling the stepdaughter to be good and to take care of business for the next john, who happens to be the father. Before anything gets too far the mother walks in on a suspicion of what Pace has her daughter doing and sees her ex-husband over her daughter. This is one of two important, and essentially only, scenes that the family must relive over and over again. In the following scene, Jay is transported to their world and her studio and crew are left behind. This scene is full of shame, hatred and fear; the things that drives the characters the most. The second scene that defines their lives happens after the mother and children move in with the father. The son still refuses to speak to his step-siblings and his mother, the father and stepdaughter continue their incestual relationship in the woods behind the house and the two small children are left alone most of the time. The little boy remains inside the house thinking about all of the suffering and pain that is occurring within his family, while the little girl is playing in the garden by the pond alone. The little girl slips and her body is discovered by the son trying to get away from his mother, both of them stumble upon her the little girl’s body. The mother pulls her body out of the water and begins to cry as she has always cried throughout the play. Immediately following the discovery of the little girl’s body, the boy shots himself with a pistol. Jay rushes to help the boy and realizes that the blood it real, but is then questioned by the father as to what is real. The characters begin to walk away off stage into another film that begins rolling with a different scene than the children’s hospice center. They leave Jay to figure out what is real and what is not. In the end, Jay makes the choice to join the characters into the film but must then choose whether to continue with them or create her own story in the film.

**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Themes: __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">__Reality:__ One issue that the director struggles with during the play differentiating between what is reality and what is an illusion. An example of reality and illusion is the stage set. Pirandello wants the stage bare; this is to confuse the audience between what is stage illusion and real life. By setting the stage this way it makes the play seem more realistic². Pirandello has no intention of writing a realistic play. In fact, he ultimately wants to call attention as much as possible to the arbitrariness of this theatrical illusion and to challenge the audience’s comfortable faith in their ability to discern reality both in and outside the theatre². As Pirandello saw it, humans have become accustomed to accepting stage illusion as a reality that they have taken stage illusion for granted. Through __Six Characters in Search of an Author__, Pirandello wants to show that by doing this, humans even mistake illusion for reality in life. <span style="color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">The “characters” insist to the end that they are “real”, even though the audience knows they are only more actors². If the characters are real though then their claim that they have been brought to life by the authors thoughts are impossible to believe. The actors express what the audience is thinking by saying, “is this some kind of joke?” and “it’s not use, I don’t understand anymore.” The play finally ends with the director refusing to make a decision and stating, “Make believe?! Reality?! Oh, go to hell the lot of you! Lights! Lights! Lights!” <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">__Concept of Self:__ Pirandello believed that if illusions are repeated often enough, believed long enough, and enough people take them to be real, illusions develop a compelling reality in the culture at large². An example of this thought is the belief in personal identity. Pirandello challenges the belief of a static personal identity through the father’s role in the play. The father asks the director, “Do you really know who you are?” in act III. The director stumbles back with, “What? Who I am? I am me!” The father then quickly points out that on any given day the director does not seem himself as the same the same way as he saw himself as in the past. This leads back to reality and illusion. The Father leads the Producer to admit that “all these realities of today are going to seem tomorrow as if they had been an illusion that perhaps you ought to distrust your own sense of reality.” Trapped by these observations, the Producer cries, “but everybody knows that [his reality] can change, don’t they? It’s always changing! Just like everybody else’s!”² <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">The question of personal identity is so important to the father because of his experience with the stepdaughter. If she is right about his identity then is an incestuous lustful man. The Father believes that “we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it’s not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it’s not true! It’s not true!” The person inside of the father that led him to the brothel where his stepdaughter was working at he does not like and he does not want to be characterized as the weak person. He regrets going to Madame Pace’s and to show his regret he says, “We realize then, [he says] that every part of us was not involved in what we’d been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one’s personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action.”

**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Absurdism: __**

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Absurdism is an idea or view of philosophical thought of existentialism, of the contrast of humanity living in a world that is and will always be hostile or uncaring and their efforts to find meaning in the world in a meaningless world. In the absurd world, there is no meaning or absolutes; the only absolute is that there is none. The absence of absolutes seems to remove all reason for living. Absurdism is based upon the nature of the absurd and how one should react to if he or she becomes conscious to it. There are three different way to resolve this problem: suicide, filling to void with a purpose set by a higher power, or accept that the world is indeed absurd and to live a life worthwhile. Suicide is seen as an escape and both Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard dismiss its practicability. Religious or spiritual belief is possible when one believe that there exists a reality beyond the absurd, in which has meaning to it. Kierkegaard stated that this would require a non-rational but possibly necessary religious acceptance in such an improvable thing empirically. Camus however regards this as a “philosophical suicide”. The last possibility is accepting that the world is and always will be absurd; this gives the human being who has come into awareness total freedom within the absurd world. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">A subgenre of Absurdism is __Theatre of the Absurd__, which involved theatrical plays that focused on absurd ideals. Theatre of the absurd began in the late 1940’s in Paris and expressed themes such as the meaninglessness of human existence within a godless universe, usually with man’s reaction to a world appearing to be meaningless or a man being controlled or threatened by invisible outside forces. Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet are seen as the fathers of theatre of the absurd.

**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Albert Camus: __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria on November 7, 1913 to a<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"> family of European colonists in French Algeria. During the war, Camus joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name; the group worked against the Nazis. Camus became the paper's editor in 1943 and was in Paris when the Allies liberated the city, where he reported on the last of the fighting. He resigned from Combat in 1947 when it became a commercial paper. Camus's first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd. He saw it as the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he expressed in //The Myth of Sisyphus// and incorporated into many of his other works, such as //The Stranger// and //The Plague//. Camus died on January 4, 1960 due to a car accident on his way to meet his publisher at the train station. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Camus considered absurdity to be a conflict between two ideals; man’s desire for meaning and the indifferent world. For Camus, the only answer when faced with the absurd world is to accept that the world has no absolutes and is meaningless. This acceptance actually gives meaning to life in Camus’ view. With acceptance comes total freedom within the absolute world since no absolutes exist in it; the freedom is established in a human's natural ability and so is opportunity to create his own meaning and purpose. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death, and I refuse suicide. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">For Camus, it is our decisions and interpretations that create meaning in the indifferent and absurd. From Camus we learn that human beings want to know about absolutes, however, there are no absolutes within this world of ours, making it absurd. Reason and the universe have an absurd relationship with reason demanding to know answers, yet receiving no response from the universe creating an absurd world. **__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Conclusion: __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">Pirandello wrote __Six Characters in Search of an Author__ to call out the audience’s generalization of reality and an illusion. The characters have to live out a moment in their lives every day and are caught up in an eternal moment. When it first came out the play caused riots in theaters because the audience because the concept was so astounding, today though the play is considered one of the most influential plays in history.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">**__<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Works Cited: __** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Camus, Albert. __The Myth of Sisyphus: And Other Essays__ (__Le Mythe de Sisyphe__). Trans. Justin O’Brien. France 1942.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">"Luigi Pirandello - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 1 Dec 2010 <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">< [] > <span style="background: #ffffcc; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">"Luigi Pirandello in English - Six Characters in Search of an Author - Introduction." //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Luigi Pirandello - Opere E Vita - Teatro, Romanzi, Novelle, Poesie, Scritti, Tematiche, Anche in PDF //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">. 12 Aug. 2010. Web. 26 Nov. 2010. <http://www.pirandelloweb.com/english/Six_Characters/Six_Characters_cover.htm>. <span style="background: white; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%; margin: 0in 0in 7.5pt;">"SparkNotes: Six Characters in Search of an Author: Character List." //SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides//. SparkNotes. Web. 25 Nov. 2010. <http://www.sparknotes.com/drama/sixcharacters/characters.html>.