Six Characters in Search of an Author

by Luigi Pirandello

where nobody understands anything, and where the author plays the fool with us all?

You represent the shell of the eggs you are beating!

A tenuous light surrounds them, almost as if irradiated by them —the faint breath of their fantastic reality.

It is merely to show you that one is born to life in many forms, in many shapes, as tree, or as stone, as water, as butterfly, or as woman. So one may also be born a character in a play.

In the sense, that is, that the author who created us alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put us into a work of art.

) The drama is in us, and we are the drama. We are impatient to play it. Our inner passion drives us on to this.

We are the audience this time.

And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself.

Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity.

Oh, all these intellectual complications make me sick, disgust me—all this philosophy that uncovers the beast in man, and then seeks to save him, excuse him

But a fact is like a sack which won’t stand up when it is empty.

I am an “unrealized” character, dramatically speaking; and I find myself not at all at ease in their company. Leave me out of it, I beg you.

We act that role for which we have been cast, that role which we are given in life.

(as if fallen from the clouds into the confusion of the stage)

the characters don’t act. Here the actors do the acting.

Your soul or whatever you like to call it takes shape here.

And now I think I see why our author who conceived us as we are, all alive, didn’t want to put us on the stage after all.

formed by the magic of the stage itself,

Truth up to a certain point, but no further.

What you want to do is to piece together a little romantic sentimental scene out of my disgust, out of all the reasons, each more cruel and viler than the other, why I am what I am.

you must surely see that you can’t have this kind of thing on the stage. It won’t go.

He wants to get at his complicated “cerebral drama,” to have his famous remorses and torments acted; but I want to act my part, my part!

The thing is to pack them all into a neat little framework and then act what is actable.

My torment isn’t a pretended one.

They can’t speak any more. They cling to me to keep my torment actual and vivid for me.

If I now see her here before me, it is only to renew for me the tortures I have suffered for her too.

This is my punishment: the passion in all of us that must culminate in her final cry.

I should like to request you to abandon this game of art (looking at the Leading Lady as if anticipating her) which you are accustomed to play here with your actors, and to ask you seriously once again: who are you?

Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his especial characteristics; for which reason he is always “somebody.” But a man —I’m not speaking of you now—may very well be “nobody.”

It’s only to show you that if we (indicating the Characters) have no other reality beyond the illusion, you too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even

Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?