CC13::Plays:: The Search for Identity in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

The beginning of twentieth century with new concepts in different aspects of science,
especially human sciences, changed the way of thinking and indeed new notions about human
beings examined their meanings in a modern way. Scientists, anthropologists, archaeologists,
psychologists, artists and writers, especially in literature, tried to fill the wide gaps and dark
spaces of doubt about human beings by studying different layers of human’s mind in different
periods of history. Luigi Pirandello was one of the writers who tried to challenge different fixed
concepts and asked about the quality of each individual being. He, like his contemporary
absurdist writers and dramatists, tried to open new doors of intellect and delight for human’s
soul and challenged new ways of understanding and perception. He invited people to think
about their self-identity in new different ways and also put emphasis on the potentiality of
human mind to recognize their existence. He tickled men’s minds with a kind of scepticism
about their identity and looked into the darker parts of each mind and also searched for a kind
of collective unconscious in order to motivate people to recognize their real I.
Luigi Pirandello believed that “self” and “identity” are concepts which are lost and
unachievable in human beings. He emphasized that all human beings wear a “mask” which
hides their identities. He traced the concept of “self” and “identity” in his plays and novels. As
one can trace, he was familiar with psychology; moreover, one of the aspects of the psychology
is to help man to achieve his “self” and “identity.” In the path of psychology, one of the
prominent psychologists is Carl Gustav Jung and his theory of “archetypes.” As the process of
“individuation” and “archetypes” show, every man can achieve his “self” and “identity”
through these “archetypes.”
Pirandello played with different aspects of human psyche in order to change the
mechanical way of thinking of what he himself believes as intellect. Although his plays begin
with an image (as like symbolic arts do) but the image remained alive and create a good
combination between fantasy and reality. The audience can see that by his dramatic gift,
“Pirandello has effectively found a way to give the abstractions of reality the stage demands”.
His Six Characters in Search of an Author, like his other works, shares the notion of identity
and challenges the audience’s minds to ask themselves who the people really are. In this play
there is no real ‘I’, no intermediary fictionalized figures, but the characters of the father, the
step-daughter and even the son, represent confounding individuals who could be too wise or
even lucky for having such ability and intellect to ask about their “I”s.
Sigmund Freud discusses the phenomenon of identity and believes that each
individual’s identity depends on three major levels of unconscious, named id, ego and
superego. He states that any neglect in developing of each of these three levels could change
the balance between them and if id or ego could not complete their growth in mind and in the
unconscious part of their mind it might create a big gap in identifying peoples’ identity; and
the transcendental ‘I’ in superego level can never ask this question that who am ‘I’ really.
In Freud’s model of personality, the ego is the aspect of personality that deals with
reality. While doing this, the ego also has to cope with the conflicting demands of the id and
the superego. The id seeks to fulfil all wants, needs, and impulses while the superego tries to
get the ego to act in an idealistic and moral manner. Accordingly, when the ego cannot deal
with the demands of men’s desires and the constraints of the reality, it results in a kind of fear
from the reality. The most common way of reducing this anxiety is to avoid the threatening
object, so someone with incorrect recognition of his self being which lives in the illusion of his
reality always escapes from the reality of his inner world. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”
(1920) and later in “The Ego and Id” Freud argued that the representation in the mind of the
real world is not a simple image of things and it should be another part stated elsewhere, more
than id and ego which he called superego. He believed that this last part with id and ego could
change the notion of identity. It means every individual’s identity is just a starting point for the
more complete aspect of his real ‘I’.

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CC13::Plays:: The Search for Identity in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

The word ‘identification’ can be understood in “two ways: transitively, ‘to identify’,
and reflexively ‘to identify (oneself) with’; and Freud uses the word in both these senses”. In
The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis declare that the
term ‘identification’, is used by Freud in order to identify the notion of self-identity. They
believe that in Freud’s view “identification in the sense of the procedure whereby the
relationship of similitude—the ‘just-as-if’ relationship—is expressed through a substitution of
one image for another,” which is described by Freud as characteristic of the dream-work. To
Freud “the concept of identification, comes little by little to have the central importance which
makes it, not simply one physical mechanism among others, but the operation itself whereby
the human subject is constituted”. And the problem of self-identity, in its complete meaning,
is a mixture of the conscious or unconscious of each individual which shows that the identity
of all persons come from their beliefs and their experiences of truth.
Luigi Pirandello like his contemporaries, tried to face modern individuals with the
relative concept of recognition and more exact self-recognition. His attempts were to examine
fixed notions in order to reconstruct new believers. He used different features of expression to
show that “the life is full of infinite absurdities” and that an individual comes “to life in many
forms, in many shapes, as tree, as a stone, as water, as butterfly and as a woman” in order to
put emphasis on the illusion of a reality here named identity.
The unknown reality of the life and the illusion of known identity are both challenged
by Pirandello. The characters in this play are divided into two groups; the actors who pretend
to be in a kind of delusion without any special identity who “want to be. They pretend to be”
real persons and as F. A. Bassanese, in Understanding Luigi Pirandello (1997) argues “whereas
the Characters damned life through art, the Actor speaks of illusion and the artful imitation of
life within a tightly structured organism”.
There are six family members who were looking for an author to help them live even
“for a moment”. Two key characters, the father and the step-daughter although for different
goals–looking for their authors, their ends, their identities in their lives to discover their real
‘I’, in order to find a responsible factor for their sorrow, their regret and their disgust. They are
suffering from blindness and being alive “like a fool”. The father, the central voice among the
characters, believes in determining role, determined the identity of each character when he
says: “the drama is in us” and “we act that role for which we have been cast, that role which
we are given in life”. He also believes that no one—even if he can pretend in the best way—
can get his role and identity and adds: “It will be difficult to act me as I really am. The effect
will be rather— apart from the make-up— according as to how he supposes I am, as he senses
me— if he does senses me—and not as I inside of myself feel myself to be”.
The father believes in a character as a determined person born with his role in life with
the duty of showing his role in the scene of life:
The Father: How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and
the value I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably
thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of
the private world he has inside himself too. We think we understand each
other: but we never do.
They want to interpret again crucial moments of their lives, claiming that they are truer
than the real characters. The characters as that much real that no one can be in their part even
for a moment and this self-identification as a personal experience makes a character too
different from an actor.
None of the characters here have any nameable identity at all. They are suffering from
being ‘nobody’ but the actors enjoy being ‘somebody’. The six characters hope to be able to
draft their play and change the tragic result of their fixity to reality of their lives. In this play
there is no name and all the characters just recognize each other by their life role, as ‘Mother’,

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‘Father’, ‘Manager’ and even ‘Actors’. Moreover, the mother does not have a real identity at
all. She is a nebulous character who is far from being perfect, that “her drama lies in her
children”; a reproductive object or better to say, an Other rather than a M(other).
The step-daughter—as the name shows—is not a real daughter and even though she
plays the role of a sexual partner—she is not a real one—she is not a real wife. The awareness
of the father about his unreal self-identity and his incompleteness makes him seek for an author.
He is a middle-aged man who put an end to his mistakes, and devoted his youth to his wrong
decisions, to his desires but he is far away from his real role in life. He searches for his soul,
his mind, his reality and his “I” in order to escape from being nobody. He himself could not be
a real husband and a real father at all and it may cause a doubt in him to ask himself, his family
and the others to help him find out what his real role in life is, or what he is living for. Although
he is aware of the notion of the self-identity, the question about the modality of his “I” is what
makes him distressed. He insists on being accepted as a representative of reality, a real person
who desires to know who he is: “a character, sir, may always as a man who he is,” but he
himself does not know actually who he is.
Pirandello believed that such kinds of suffering from the absence of self-knowledge
may hurt just some individual’s soul and mind, someone like the father, in society:
The Father: I know that for many people this self-blinding seems much more ‘human’;
but the contrary is really true […] the animals suffer without reasoning
about their suffering. But take the case of a man who suffers and begins to
reason about it. Oh no! It can’t be allowed! Let him suffer like an animal,
and then–ah yet, he is ‘human’!
He wants to show how ‘living’ is different from ‘being alive’ and how self-recognition
in this life might be the borderline of humanity and animality. In Freudian view, the animal
part of the mind is ‘The Id’, the instinct-driven part that motivates passions and emotions and
also makes snap decisions. Though as Pirandello claims suffering without reasoning is like
living like animals, just living with the unconscious part of the mind, without thinking about
any transcendental being and the self-identification for those who want to save themselves from
animality. It is so much painful that some prefer to suffer like an animal and just some curious
intellects—like the Father—and in a long process could stand that.
Freud retained the concept of the rational ego, but subjugated it to three severe masters:
the unconscious instincts, the punitive superego, and the demands of external reality. The
notion of personal identity with this view is not far from the situation Pirandello provides in
his play. In this play there are six characters whose unconscious part of minds is superior to
their rational part and they are all living with their emotions. But suffering from lack of identity
and a reasoning mind makes the characters look for their authors in order to ask about their real
“I”s.
Freud believed that there is no need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s
protection and he also believed in mother as the first object of love. In this play, among
Pirandello’s six characters, the children are never satisfied with their parent’s love, even their
existence and they do not have any real parents at all. The Son never experiences his father’s
love and also never feels his father’s existence in his life and as Freud believed, there is nothing
more important than a father’s love for a son. Pirandello reconstructs the psychological view
of self-identity through searching among illusion and reality and creates his characters
confounded in their trip passing their id to ego and superego.
Among Pirandello’s central themes, the problem of identity, the ambiguity of truth and
reality, are compared with most of absurd dramatists who tried to show the meaninglessness of
physical life. But Pirandello has opened the door of hope with the key of intellect, the key of
self-recognition. In this play, he does not want to show only the reality or unreality of life, but
he goes further and emphasizes the wrong recognition of the reality of self-identity. This play

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represents a life in which, although there is a play that must be played, there are no real actors
and no real author at all; in contrast, there are real ‘I’s that play their actual role and the reality
of their identity are in doubt. The characters, in this play, are confusing the audience and they
are finding themselves between the reality and illusion. It is also playing with the unconscious
part of each audience because they are the real and unreal characters at the same time.
Witnesses of this charismatic play see some characters who are aware of their existences, their
beings and the big deception they are living in as the ‘Life’, but the greatest pain of living for
nothing or living without being anybody—or worse being nobody—makes them change their
unreal “I”s to real “I”s.
The dead kids here—moving like alive ones—make the depth of illusion deeper and on
the other hand, their silent existence warns the audience about the silent realities around them,
some ones or some things which are dumb and need to see more exactly. These mute kids
reflect the determined and delusive notion of each individual’s identity that has been projected
on people in order to convince them accept some reality with no question about their validity
or modality. These dumb mobile kids may be symbols of realities in each person’s life which
are moving with them and can have an effect on their lives but in silence. Something like
people’s self-identity, which is lives with all individuals—or better to say which has been
carried by them—often, may affect their real ‘I’s but unawareness about this identity may cause
them be drown in the pool of fate with no recognition about the goals of life. The contrast
between the absolute solitude of the characters and the gap after recognizing the two kids’
death may make each audience ask him/herself that who I am really. By creating such a range
between dead and alive characters, Pirandello creates an objective situation in which the
identity missed its meaning. In this way, the play shows the deep meaning of self-identity
hanging between reality and illusion.
In this play there are both fictional and real characters at the same time. The fictional
and real father, mother, step-daughter and kids, but none of them can accept his/her existence
or reality. The father cannot accept the role of husband so he leaves his wife and goes away
and then he cannot accept the role of father because he lives in an imaginary world through
making a kind of unreal identity for himself but he finds out that he cannot continue living in
illusion:
Father: Ah! Disdains debasing liaisons! Not old enough to do without women, and not
young enough to go and look for one without shame. Misery? It is worse than
misery; it’s a horror; […] and when a man feels this…one ought to do without,
you say? Yes, yes. I know. Each of us when he appears before his fellows is
clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows that uncomfortable things
pass within the secretory of his own heart.
the climax point of her sorrow and living in a world between illusion and reality of the
happened event and in an unreal world she is living in:
The Step-Daughter: Shame indeed! This is my revenge! I am dying to live that
scene… The room… Here is the window with the mantles exposed, there the
divan, the looking-glass, a screen, there in front of the window the little
mahogany table with the blue envelope containing one hundred lire. I see. I see.
I could take hold of it.
On the other hand, one can see the ‘Mother’, who prefers to be hibernated in delusion
of reality and to play the role of a determining character without speaking, but just complaining;
for this reason, she has the fewest dialogues in the play: “The mother is unaware that she is
incomplete and not alive, and so totally fictional, fixed and passive in her own world”. The
pressure on her common and traditional mind is too much more than what she can stand, so
she prefers to live in the shadow of reality instead of reality and maybe she accepts to be “as
tree, as a stone, as water, as butterfly and as a woman” because her weak, fragile and traditional

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CC13::Plays:: The Search for Identity in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

mind prefers to escape from her ego. The unreal “I” that she makes for herself is just a deception
that helps her escape from finding reasons for her mistakes. She is nothing at all and never was
because she always decides based on her emotions, and according to Freud, based on her
unconscious part of her mind. She is not a real mother, real wife or even a real widow as
Pirandello writes:
The Manager [dumbfounded]:I don’t understand at all. What is the situation? Is this
lady your wife? [To the father]
The Father: Yes, gentleman: my wife. The Manager. But how can she be a widow if
you are alive?
She does not believe in herself as an “I” and she sees her individuality incomplete
without the others. She speaks always about two dead kids, however, she is aware of their
death, but as she says, the illusion of existence of the kids makes her believe in herself or makes
her feel alive: “They cling to me to keep up my torment actual and vivid for me. But for
themselves, they don’t exist, they aren’t anymore”
The actors even prefer their unreal identity because they will get rid of their unwanted
desires and even satisfy some of their desires in a kind of illusive life. The woman actor prefers
living in her role, instead of living with her character because just in that way she could be the
beloved of the male actor. Although there are no special dialogues, there are a lot of acts created
by Pirandello that shows his attempts to reflect his effort in creating such a situation in which
the characters represent their meaningless lives.
Freud, in his letter to Wilhelm Fliess, mentioned that “being entirely honest with
yourself is a good exercise”, but none of the characters in this play are honest with themselves;
in fact, none of them could adapt himself for the role born in and just try to escape from reality
to illusion what Freud believes as an escape from life to death. As Freud states each individual’s
identity is rooted in his id and as the unconscious part of his personality, but the superego or
the ideal ego will never exist if a man is not aware of his inner “I”, so there would be no self-
reorganization or self-identification at all. He also claims that this self-identification happens
when someone is looking for his “I”. Six Characters shows a free challenge for each individual
to get rid of his mistakes and look for his inner self. It goes to light the way of intellect for the
modern minds to escape from the darkness of the world they trapped in and wants to save
human being from a woven web of illusion they are involved in.
Pirandello used the familiar metaphors of life as a stage and the individual as a player
to convey philosophical insight into the human condition in the modern world. This playwright
dramatizes several continuing themes throughout his literary production: the fluid mutability
of identity, the interaction of reality and illusion and the relationship of life and art. His special
view to human identity in most of his works—and in his Six Characters particularly—is part
of his attempt to implicate his audience in a story narrated by modern individuals and he wants
to reconstruct new human beings with the ability of recognizing themselves. He creates a scene
with characters and actors to exemplify “the dialectical rapport of form and life” to mirror the
relative concept of identity and to show different potential of human’s mind for understanding
their self-beliefs. He tried to change or at least affect the modern drama moving in the way that
helps the world to change. While he uses fantasy as his base of inspiration, one may call his
writing method, symbolist, but “he declared that he hated symbolic art, which in its need to be
allegorical destroyed all spontaneity”
The analysis and dissolution of a unified self are carried to an extreme in his Six
Characters where the stage can be the symbol of appearance versus reality. Pirandello portrays
the notion of self-identity as the border line of reality and illusion and tries to emphasize that
when someone answers what is reality and what is illusion then he can answer who he really
is.

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