Naked Masks Metaphors and Similes

Naked Masks Metaphors and Similes

Mother: Nature

One of the non-dramaturgical inclusions in Naked Masks found in the Appendix is the Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author. In discussing those characters, Pirandello divulges the true metaphorical essence of the Mother:

“In short, she is nature. Nature in the fixed figure of a mother.”

What Is Art?

The prose essays of the Appendix is also where can be found Pirandello’s riff on the question of what art actually is. Of course, since he is phrasing things metaphorically, the question may not be entirely cleared up by his answer:

“All that lives, by the fact of living, has a form and by the same token must die—except the work of art which lives forever in so far as it is form.”

Stage Directions

The stage directions of a play are usually the one aspect that tends to go light on metaphorical instruction. Of course, that depends entirely upon the playwright. Shakespeare, for instance, is notoriously skimpy on stage directions. (The most famous being “Exit, pursued by a bear.”) Pirandello is hardly considered a master of realism or a slave to convention, so it should be less surprising to find poetic similes even in his direction to physical movement by actors:

Delia

Yes, you are right. You are right! [She runs to him like a flame, pushing aside the two men who restraining him.]”

So THAT'S What Duran Duran is Talking About!

In the included play Henry IV is a scene in which the title character ponders—whines, really, is more appropriate—about his hair having gone grey while on the throne. From this he makes his way outward in ever more philosophical terms to transform the simple process of going gray on top to the inevitability of death:

“everything was finished; and I was going to arrive, hungry as a wolf, at a banquet which had already been cleared away.”

The Windmills of His Mind…Literally Metaphorically

In the play Liolà, the title character breaks into song at one point. He’s not hungry…like a wolf or something…but kind of dizzy in the membrane:

“My brain it is a windmill:

When the wind blows, it’s never still”

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