Authorship and Meaning Theme Analysis

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, and the Characters’ frustrations and attempts to get revenge on their author demonstrate how they gained their own consciousness and became independent of him. The Father announces that the Characters were “born of an author’s fantasy” but “denied life by him.” And yet they take life on their own and insist on staging their drama—that is, becoming the authors of their own destiny, controlling the meaning of their existence. The Son’s doubt shows that the Characters’ authorial impulses extend beyond seeking the life they were denied and challenges the other Characters’ assumption that Characters must fully express themselves: the Son refuses to act, and instead declares that he wants to “stand in for the will of our author” by grinding the drama to a halt and refusing to turn the family’s horrific story into a spectacle. The others’ desire for drama overpowers his reluctance, however, and the final tragedy plays itself out without ever turning into the clean theatrical ending the Manager desires. As the Characters repeatedly try to demonstrate their personalities and recount their experiences, the Manager has to shut them down over and over because they threaten to throw the rehearsal (and his future play) out of balance. From the beginning, even before the Characters’ arrival, the Manager is aware of his predicament: referencing the other Pirandello play that his troupe is supposedly rehearsing, he declares that “the author plays the fool with us all.”

While the Characters and Manager attempt to take over the role of the author, their efforts inevitably fail, much like the author’s initial attempt to control and put an end to his Characters. In the end, although the drama the Manager imagines fails to materialize and the curtain falls after an abrupt and unexplained tragedy, the play complicates straightforward notions of unitary authorship. Instead, it argues that authorship—the creation of a narrative and determination of its meaning—is a contested and collaborative process.

The Characters explicitly ask the Manager to be their author: he is the most obvious author-figure in the play because he directs how the Characters divulge their drama and how the action unfolds throughout the play, for instance by literally calling for the “curtain” that ends the Second Act. In fact, he does not mean to lower the curtain, but the Mechanist misinterprets him and does so, which suggests that the Manager’s power over the play does not mean the play always obeys him—he is an author but without complete authorial control. The Step-Daughter and Father complicate this by also seeking to become authors: the Step-Daughter wants to control the stage decorations to make them as realistic as possible and the Father wants to determine the true philosophical meaning of events. Indeed, the other Characters accuse the Father of colluding backstage with the Manager to twist the story to his favor. Everyone ignores the Father’s philosophical speeches, however, and the Manager refuses to heed the Step-Daughter’s calls for detailed changes to the scenery because it is simply impossible given the constraints of the theater. In contrast to the messiness of the Characters’ reality, the Manager’s job is to make reality suitable for the theater, to “combine and group up all of the facts in one simultaneous, close-knit, action.” Of course, Pirandello inverts this traditional rule: whereas “authors, as a rule, hide the labor of their creations” (according to the Father), in this play Pirandello foregrounds it.

Beyond merely raising the question of what a character really is and how they relate to the author who creates but then loses control over them, Pirandello’s play shows that authorship is actually a complex process out of which a work emerges with no clear or singular impetus. In a sense, the Manager and Father are both reflections of Pirandello: the former of his attempts to create meaning as an author, and the latter of his own doubts about his existence and decisions. Characters are all reflections of and yet independent of an author; as the Manager puts it, the author is “never satisfied!” no matter how well their characters (and actors) play their parts. If there is any agent behind the process of creation, in which an author molds and consults with their own characters, it is the “Demon of Experiment”—the diabolically productive conflict among Characters each trying to express their truth, Actors who must interpret them, and the Manager who must keep them in balance and move the story forward. In a way, the entire play is a writer or dramatist’s internal monologue as they work out the tensions between the whims of their characters and the necessity to create a coherent work.