A character study of the personalities in “Six Characters in Search of an Author” by playwright Luigi Pirandello.
The paper examines the drama “Six Character in Search of an Author,” written by Luigi Pirandello, which is play within a play. The paper shows Pirandello’s theme throughout the play that life is a script with people fixed to patterns that are evident in everyday workings of life and through the history of previous lives.
The drama Six Characters in Search of an Author, written by Luigi Pirandello, is a play within a play, full of reality philosophizing, which shows how people are real in the same way that characters are. These two themes are highly reflective on what it means to be a play, by comparing it to life, and what it means to be a person, by comparing what it means to be a character. The drama is an assemblage of a play, put together on the spot, when six characters enter another play’s rehearsal in search of an author who will manifest their roles by writing a script to their drama. This is their one bent purpose in life, to live on the stage, in their world in which they are real. Though they seem alive, as they are in their search, they are not fulfilling the purpose of filling their roles. They need to tell their stories, they desire reaffirmation of existence and for this they need their fixed reality, the stage. Their script is this means of existence and acting the script out is a means of living or being real. People in the same way are doomed to be scripted; identical to characters, they live only within their fixed play, that which acts itself out from birth to death.