Action, Fate, and Absurdity Theme Analysis

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. The Characters enter the play existentially stuck, lacking an author but somehow full of detailed knowledge about how their story will end. Like actors onstage, they dutifully fulfill this fate, which is at once completely foreknown and completely shocking to both of their audiences—the Actors who are supposed to play them and the ticketholders filling the theater. They confront circumstances that at once make no sense and cannot possibly be avoided—in other words, they find themselves powerless before fate and nature, which they submit to against and despite their judgment, understanding, and desire to change.

The Characters step into an ambiguous world where things happen for no reason. The Characters’ mysterious appearance does not only embody this principle; the Characters themselves also espouse it. One of the first things the Father says is that “life is full of infinite absurdities” that are true nevertheless, and he later pontificates that “one is born to life in many forms,” including that “one may also be born a character in a play.” The Characters continue to show off the apparent absurdity of their existence when the Step-Daughter introduces herself cryptically, by insulting her brother (the Boy) and singing and dancing to a French song. The end of the play is also inexplicable and mechanical—the audience never learns why the Child drowns and the Boy shoots himself, nor whether the Boy killed the Child or all these events are related to the rest of the family’s history of conflict and trauma.

Despite the meaninglessness of their lives and suffering, the Characters are bound to their fate, of which they themselves are the orchestrators. The Manager and the Actors reference this from the very beginning of the play, when they are rehearsing “Mixing It Up” and the Manager explains that the message of the play is the Leading Man’s character “becom[ing] the puppet of [him]self.”

The Characters are well aware of what they will do, even though they recognize it as horrible: during the First Act, the Step-Daughter and Father both explicitly say that they will have a sexual encounter, and then the Child and Boy will die. Indeed, the Father blames “the complicated torments of my spirit” for all his family’s problems: even though they are the agents of their own destruction and fully aware of this throughout the play, the Characters are fully unable to stop it. The Father repeatedly insists that, although he spent his whole life trying to achieve “moral sanity” (to live sensibly and benevolently), he ultimately had to admit that “evil […] may spring from good,” such as how he destroyed his family despite his intelligence and best intentions.

The Father’s philosophizing shows the role of thinking, reason, and art in relation to the meaninglessness of life: these faculties and products of mind allow people to make sense of their lives and their lack of control over their fates. But while people try to make the world and its events rational, ultimately they never can, and reason only operates in retrospect. The Father insists that his relentless theorizing is his way of “crying aloud the reason of [his] sufferings.” The others criticize the Father for thinking he “has got the meaning of it all,” and he twists this, arguing that he is trying to create “a meaning and a value” in his otherwise meaningless life. The Father is fully aware that his analysis does nothing, and yet he continues performing it: he believes that a word, phrase, or saying “tells us nothing and yet calms us” in a time of crisis. 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 Father’s philosophizing is inevitable, his way of responding to life’s absurdity and making sense of his suffering, but it is also useless: it does nothing to concretely change his situation or his family’s animosity toward him. They repeatedly tell him this, and the Manager interrupts him over and over by noting that his philosophizing does nothing to advance their immediate project: putting on a drama. There is no doubt that this condition is Pirandello’s metaphor for the human condition at large: things happen, and people rush to explain them but inevitably fall short—and fall victim to the next inexplicable occurrence that their moral reckoning does little to prevent.