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Analysis

According to Professor Grant L. Voth of Monterey Peninsula College, Pirandello was part of a movement in the early 20th century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism. The theatricalists rejected realist drama and substituted the dreamlike, the expressive, and the symbolic. The theatricalists disapproved of realism because it had abandoned the defining tools of drama, such as poetry, interaction between actors and audience, soliloquies, asides and bare stages. They thought realism could not depict the inner life of human beings.

The play demonstrates these ideas in several ways. The focus of the play is on the interactions of the six characters with the real actors in the theater. This suggests that human beings cannot distinguish between the real and the apparent – the distinction itself is illusory. “Reality” is merely what one happens to believe in at the moment.

The Father character argues that fictional characters are more “real” than living ones, since they are fixed eternally, while a living person is constantly changing and subject to time.

'The Father [with a cry]: No, sir, not ours! Look here! That is the very difference! Our reality doesn't change: it can't change! It can't be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. It's terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach us if you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a mere transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, according to the conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect that shows them to you today in one manner and tomorrow . . . who knows how? . . . Illusions of reality represented in this fatuous comedy of life that never ends, nor can ever end! Because if tomorrow it were to end . . . then why, all would be finished.'

Pirandello, in the preface to the play, says that whenever a reader opens Dante’s Inferno, Francesca will drift down from the dark wind in her circle of Hell and tell the Pilgrim her story; and it will always be for the first time – just as the Mother in Pirandello’s play at one point makes an agonizing cry, always for the first time.

Each character sees events and the other characters differently. Their readings of reality do not match up. No one character is more correct than the other. There are as many versions of the story as there are characters in the play. Each character is in fact many characters; each has a sense of who he or she is, but each also is what the others believe he or she is.

The play suggests that we are more victims of forces we cannot control than captains of our own fate and demonstrates Pirandello's conception that in place of a continuous ego, self or "I" are states of mind, masks or personae; the temporary result of forces brought to bear on us at that moment. The self becomes an anthology of such roles or masks. Theatricalists thought life was more like theater than vice versa. As in theater, we put on and take off masks, try out various roles, and make up our lives as we go along.