 The Father as a mouthpiece of Pirandello and autobiographical element.

The Manager asks the Father to stop philosophizing and tells him it is truly
ridiculous for him to think he is a Character created by an author, but the Father
insists that he is not philosophizing, but merely “crying aloud the reason of my
sufferings,” and that he and his family truly were “born of an author’s fantasy” and
then “denied life by him.” The Manager can “give them their stage life,” and the
Step-Daughter warns him against “abandon[ing]” the Characters like their author
did. (The Father suggests that the Manager can “modify” some of the Characters
rather than abandon them.) Ultimately, the Characters and Manager agree that the
last scene will take place in the garden—for which the stage is already set. The
Manager starts coaching the Boy on how to act, and the Son tries to leave, but the
Step-Daughter stops him because “he is obliged to stay here, indissolubly bound to
the chain.” He refuses to act out a scene with the desperate Mother, who insists that
this scene did take place. The other Characters force to threaten the Son to act, but
he accuses the Father of trying to take their author’s place and even changing the
story for his own convenience. The Manager asks the Son what really did happen,
and the Son reluctantly begins narrating the “horrible” events—the Manager looks
over and sees the Child drowned in the fountain, and the Son mentions the Boy’s
“eyes like a madman’s.” Suddenly, the revolver goes off behind some trees, and
the Actors drag out the Boy’s body. Shocked, they cannot decide if he is really
dead or if “it’s only make believe.” The Father insists it is reality and the Manager
exclaims, “to hell with it all!” as the curtain falls. The end of the play fulfills the
predictions the Step-Daughter and Father made in Act One, even though the
audience might have lost track of these a long time before this final scene. As in so
many ancient tragedies, although the characters and audience alike all know the
dark prophecy that will be fulfilled, everyone is surprised when it actually happens.
The revolver that the Boy mysteriously produced at the beginning of the Second
Act finally finds a purpose, even if its existence remains unexplained throughout,
just like the motives and context behind the deaths of the Boy and Child, which
seem to happen for no reason at all—and yet represent a kind of symbolic response
to the family’s trauma. Namely, their deaths at once show the deep impacts of the
Father’s actions on the children (whose muteness the audience can now come to
understand) and undo the illegitimacy of the family, restoring it to the original
form—Father, Mother, Son. However, this far-from-happy nuclear family arises
only as a curse and a farce, just as the Father’s attempts to create an ideal family
continuously backfire. Curiously absent from this English edition of the text is the
final stage direction obeyed in nearly all performances of this play, in which the
Step-Daughter runs offstage and out of the theater, screaming maniacally.

 His coping mechanism suggests another interesting reading of this play: as a

study of how men use intellect (the Father), power (the Manager), and the
respect they demand to cover up and distract from their abusive behavior.
 Since the Father, Step Daughter, and Manager all represent different
authorial impulses (the Father the impulse to explain, the Step-Daughter the
impulse to shock, and the Manager the impulse to preserve order), it is also
possible to read this entire play as the internal monologue of an author
struggling with the process of composition. Rather than try to resolve these
forces into a balanced work, Pirandello exacerbates each of them to shed
light on their conflict.
 The Father’s argument about the value of philosophy shows directly why
this play is often considered a foundational text or precursor to
existentialism: the Father sees that philosophy is an attempt to make
meaning out of meaninglessness, but also that he has no choice but to
engage in it, lest he submit and allow himself to suffer meaninglessly (like
the Mother)

Authorship and Meaning

In his Preface to the 1925 version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi
Pirandello revealed that the six Characters at the heart of the play were his own
creations, and that he was the author who abandoned them more than a decade
earlier after failing to place them in an adequate story. But they took on a life of
their own and began to haunt him while he worked on other projects. This process
showed him that his creations were not entirely his own: rather, his characters
became independent beings that lived in his imagination and gradually forced him
to write out their “drama.” The drama he creates is, in fact, the story of this whole
process, played out on stage. As the Characters seek their author and struggle for
control (authorship) of the narrative they are piecing together with the Actors and
Manager, the audience or reader learns that authorship is not about an
otherworldly, ingenious process of creating something out of nothing. According
to Pirandello, works of art and their meanings spring not from a single, directed
consciousness but from a collaborative and often conflicted process of cobbling
together stories and meaning. The conflict over authorship in this play is
fundamentally an argument about who controls the meaning of a text

Fate, Action, and Absurdity

Six Characters in Search of an Author is often cited as an important influence on a

whole generation of post-World War Two playwrights famous for “Theatre of the
Absurd”: plays that cope with the difficulty of making meaning out of an
apparently meaningless world, especially in a modern society where people have
lost the fixed moral codes previously enforced by religion, just as Pirandello’s
characters are “abandoned” by their author.

Even though he knows it is fleeting, he seeks meaning through reason in order to

try and comfort himself in a world that he realizes has no inherent meaning. In
contrast to the Father’s philosophical monologues, the Mother responds to her
family’s crisis by suffering acutely and silently. Although she is much less of an
annoyance to the rest of the people in the theater, she clearly also fares worse than
the Father, whose analysis helps alleviate his pain.

THE CURTAIN

In most normal plays, the curtain is an unremarkable piece of equipment, useful

only to mark the opening and closing of dramatic action to which it is irrelevant.
The curtain between the audience and the actors clearly demarcates the line
between fiction and reality—when it raises at the beginning of a performance, it
invites the audience into a fantasy world, and when it lowers at a show’s
conclusion, it dismisses the audience to return to their lives. But, given his interest
in upending dramatic norms and challenging the conventional division between life
and fiction, Pirandello does away with this normal use of the curtain for staging,
and instead turns the curtain into an integral part of the play itself.
THE REVOLVER

Recalling the Characters’ bizarre entrance, Act Two of Six Characters in Search of
an Author begins with a handful of inexplicable and seemingly absurd events. The
Step Daughtercomes to the stage with her two siblings: the confused Child, whom
she comforts, and the anxious Boy, whom she berates after she notices a revolver
in his pocket. The revolver at once fulfills and mocks the narrative conventions of
the theater. On the one hand, it literally references Chekhov’s famous declaration
that “if you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the
second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.” This principle, commonly
known as “Chekhov’s gun”—that everything in a story must have and fulfill a
specific purpose, that all loose ends must be tied up—is the essence of the
Manager’s quest to convert the Characters’ messy and conflicted family drama into
a coherent, neat story. While he wants to remove loose ends by “group[ing] up all
the facts in one simultaneous, close-knit, action,” the Characters want to express
themselves individually and present their conflicting versions of events. On the
other hand, while the revolver points to the narrative principle that everything must
have a place and purpose, it also foreshadows the utterly inexplicable conclusion of
the story, which dismantles this narrative principle. Just before the final curtain, the
Child drowns in the fountain and the Boy shoots himself. There is no explanation
for why or how this happens, and the Actors, Characters, and audience never
determine whether the Boy and Child are acting out their past experiences or
actually dying before the Manager in the theater. The revolver therefore first looks
like a red herring: strange, out of context, and irrelevant to the Characters’ drama,
much like the Step-Daughter’s French song and dance in the First Act. However, it
is later revealed as a crucial part of the storyline—but only because it effects a
conclusion that makes just as little sense as its initial appearance. This narrative
double-cross allows Pirandello to challenge the apparent opposition between
messy, conflicted, uncertain reality and clean, coherent storylines in which
everything has a reason and effects a logical outcome.