Six Characters in Search of an Author: Act 3 Summary & Analysis

Although very little time has passed between the end of the last Act and the beginning of this one, suddenly the play shifts into a more self-consciously theatrical tone, with the arrangement of people staging a symbolic conflict between the Characters and the Actors seeking to represent them, with the conflict and action balanced by the Manager. It is unclear whether the stage decorations are integral to the plot or simply red herrings—the Step-Daughter mentioned a fountain at the beginning of Act Two, but still has not given any context.

The Mother’s brief line gives the audience some insight into her mindset and (given her distress at watching the Father and Step-Daughter together) her level of desperation when they decided to move in with the Father. It becomes clear that this recent move only gave the family time and space for their conflicts to fester—leading them ultimately to seek resolution, catharsis, and justice through the stage.

The Step-Daughter again tries to take authorial control over the Manager’s play to ensure it resembles the reality of the family’s past events as closely as possible. The Manager’s response comments on the play the audience is watching as much as the play he is planning—in both of them, which are now increasingly indistinguishable, the action must be condensed because of the theater’s practical constraints as a storytelling method. The Father's objection to the term “illusion” both reaffirms his insistence that the Characters (more so than the Actors) really exist and foreshadows the way illusion and reality get completely “mixed up” with one another in the rest of this scene.

Again, the two mirrored sets of players, the Characters standing on the right half of the stage and the Actors on the left, mutually insist on their own realness and deny that of their counterparts. These parallels get tighter throughout the play: here, the Father insults the Leading Lady by miscommunicating precisely the same idea that the Manager has just miscommunicated to him. Asking the Manager about his identity, the Father furthers the parallel between them—as the play’s two authorial figures, they both represent different parts of Pirandello and different forces inherent in any process of authorship (with the Father as the impulse to explain, elaborate, and divulge, and the Manager as the streamlining process that prevents characters and storylines from falling out of balance).

The professional actors playing Pirandello’s script onstage again publicly ridicule their own profession and, speaking both on the level of the play-within-the-play and directly to the audience, insist that people “seriously” confront the fundamental emptiness of human identity and existence. Characters’ confinement to art is also what gives them identity—whereas people themselves can be many things, including many characters, and therefore lack an essence. This relates to the reputation of actors as unknowable and potentially deceitful people, with no core identity (which allows them to easily take on so many others onstage). But the Father is arguing that everyone is constantly acting and only ever pretending to have a real “self.”

Lacking thoughtful responses to the Father’s probing questions, the Manager simply tries to close the matter by asserting his authority—but, for the first time, his authority (the basis of his job and identity) begins “sinking away.” It is usurped by the Father, who at once tells and demonstrates for the Manager that human identity is more of an “illusion” than that of characters. Essentially, he raises the classic philosophical question of personal identity through time: people constantly change, and because they are not the same from one day to the next, how can they insist they are the same people throughout their lives—or, even more obstinately, that they have specific defining characteristics that are inherent to their identities?

Just as the Manager’s reality is the Father’s illusion and vice versa, the Manager’s joke is the Father’s serious belief. Rather than arguing that Characters are better or more fortunate than normal people because they have identities and lack mortal bodies, the Father actually sees it as a kind of eternal condemnation, a life sentence in the prison of an author or character’s own making. (The Father, specifically, will be eternally bound to remember and cope with his own moral errors.) However, the Father also thinks that normal people are no better off because they have to deal with being, at core, nothingness. If people are constantly performing their identities and “selves” in the “fatuous comedy of life,” then the Father is not ultimately arguing that fiction is better or worse, more or less genuine than reality: rather, he is arguing that the two cannot be clearly separated.

The Manager implies as clearly as possible that the Father is a foil for Pirandello, the original author who abandoned the Characters (but has nevertheless made an eternal imprint of them, and has brought them to life precisely by letting them lament their own abandonment). While it may go too far to say the Father’s beliefs about reality and illusion are all Pirandello’s own, there is a clear overlap between the Father and the play’s refusal to draw a firm line between reality and illusion, and it is interesting to consider the many parallels between the Father’s life and Pirandello’s own. (Most notably, just as the Father sent the Mother away years before because their temperaments were unmatched, Pirandello sent his mentally ill wife—who could not distinguish between reality and fantasy—to a mental asylum a few years before writing this play.)

The Father’s reference to “those who do not think what they can feel” recalls the very beginning of the play, when the Manager tells the Leading Man that his husband role represents the intellect, and the Leading Lady that, as the wife, she represents nature. The Father and Mother clearly fit this bill, which further supports the theory that the Characters are actually performing—or rehearsing—“Mixing it Up” all along. While the others see him as inhuman because he philosophizes instead of genuinely facing the consequences of his actions, the Father seems to consider the Mother inhuman because she is dominated by feeling. They, too, are irreconcilable mirrors of each other. The Manager calls the Father’s monologues “philosophizing” because (as the Father admitted in the First Act) they serve no purpose except self-gratification and distraction, whereas the Father thinks that he is somehow making amends by speaking. 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.

Pirandello expressly breaks the rule of the theater, repeatedly reaching out to show “the labor of [his] creations” and the backstage labor that makes theater possible. As though to taunt his critics, he has the Father explicitly point this out here, breaking conventions precisely by directly saying that he breaks conventions. Ironically, Pirandello also speaks directly through the Father in order to argue that authors lose control of their characters—which is, of course, how the Characters ended up in the theater.

Although the Manager has just accused the Father of being Pirandello, the Characters now call the Manager their author, not only the gatekeeper to their “stage life” but also, apparently, the original author who abandoned them. 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 violates the primary rule of writing that most students learn in primary school: instead of showing, he tells. Of course, philosophy is supposed to do the opposite and speak directly. 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).

The Manager shows again how the theater portrays truth by distorting reality: it turns the messiness of life and subjective experience into cleanly-packaged stories digestible from an external perspective that is never available in day-to-day life. For the first time in the play, the Child and Boy act—but it is altogether unclear what for. The Step-Daughter’s affection for the Child again calls into question whose child the little girl really is, and the Step-Daughter directly cites the stain of taboo and illegitimacy when she says that she has been “vile[ly] contaminated” by her relationship with the Father.

At once, after a long deliberation, the authors of the play—the Father and Step-Daughter who both try to determine its meaning, and the Manager who sets it in motion—find that, completely unbeknownst to them, the scene has set itself. The play hurls forward with no clear author. The Son’s refusal to act sets in stone his status as an “unrealized character”—the audience never learns if he played a part in the coming “terrible” scene or if this scene is in fact the reason for his refusal to honor the spectacle of the theater to begin with.

The Son, fully aware that he is in a play, sees that his own will can only go so far—he is ultimately bound to his fate and the unhappy family that has imposed itself on him. He and the Mother are not acting at all—although she does not even seem to understand or respond to the context of the stage, but merely acts out the affection and concern for her children that would likely guide her behavior in any context. The Son’s dilemma also takes on a double meaning: he and the Father are not only arguing over acting on a stage, but also acting as in implementing a decision, taking a step forward, and overcoming resistance and uncertainty. The Son is not only being compelled to act in a performance; he is also being forced to fulfill the collective family fate that he did not choose but cannot avoid.

The Manager’s strange direction reminds the audience that everyone already knows what is about to happen. While the Mother and Son treat their time onstage as a reality, the Actors continue thinking of it as a script. The Son’s exasperation about “liv[ing] in front of a mirror” points to the double consciousness required in the theater, where actors are both the subject controlling the narratives and the objects under control, both author and material. This recalls not only the Father and Step-Daughter’s multiple roles, but also the Manager’s line to the Leading Man at the very start of the play, while rehearsing “Mixing it Up”: he is to “become the puppet of [him]self.”

The Son’s final stand is both a success and a failure: he successfully refuses to participate and show the world his experience of events, but he fails to stop the show altogether. Just before the final climax, he again calls attention to the unreliability of all the Characters as narrators, not to mention the Manager who liberally adapts their story for the stage. While they all give competing versions, the Son insists on leaving a blank for the reader or audience to fill in and defends the author for trying to put a stop to the Characters’ drama. With this, he turns into the play’s final author figure: like the author who abandoned the Characters, the Son is about to have his will overruled.

The meaning of the Son’s silence has completely transformed: it is now clear that he refused to speak because he did not want to publicly reenact this horrible trauma. He was silent because of his pain, not his hatred for or indifference toward the other Characters. The Boy’s “madman” glare suggests he may have had something to do with the Child’s death, but this question is never resolved.

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.