Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

Published 1921 · 72 pages · 20,757 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Drama

How hard is Six Characters in Search of an Author to read?

Six Characters in Search of an Author scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
Pirandello writes in theatrical language that translates cleanly. The vocabulary is accessible, with the difficulty residing in the philosophical concepts rather than in unusual words.
Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
The dialogue flows naturally, as befits a play. Sentences are conversational, even when characters debate the nature of reality and fiction.
Abstraction: 72 out of 100
The play confronts heavy abstractions: the relationship between author and character, the nature of artistic creation, the gap between life and art. Characters argue about whether fictional beings have more authentic existence than real people.
Information density: 50 out of 100
The play packs philosophical debate into theatrical exchange. Pirandello layers questions about identity, reality, and representation into what appears to be a backstage drama.
Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
Six Characters disrupts narrative entirely. The 'characters' interrupt a rehearsal to demand their story be told, but the story they bring is fragmented and contested. Readers must navigate the gap between what the characters want and what the actors and director can grasp.
Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
The unfinished story becomes a symbol of human lives seeking meaning. The stage itself becomes a symbol of the gap between authentic experience and theatrical representation. The Father's philosophical speeches carry the weight of Pirandello's ideas about identity.
Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
Pirandello constructs an irony that implicates the audience. The 'real' actors in the play are less real than the fictional characters; life imitates art but cannot capture it. The play remains deeply skeptical about our ability to know ourselves or others.
Resolution withholding: 68 out of 100
The characters' story remains unfinished, and deliberately so. Pirandello refuses the closure that traditional theater promises, leaving the relationship between author, character, and reality permanently unresolved.
Structural complexity: 68 out of 100
The play is a metatheatrical puzzle. Plays within plays, characters who know they are characters, and actors who cannot understand them create a structure that constantly questions its own theatrical conventions.

How Six Characters in Search of an Author is regarded

Six Characters in Search of an Author holds a literary regard score of 94 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where Six Characters in Search of an Author sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (40 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Six Characters in Search of an Author scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Our reality doesn't change: it can't change! It can't be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. It's terrible.
Symbol: Formal
The illusion, I tell you, sir, which we've got to create for the audience . . .
Mythos: Ironic Tragedy iv (tragic pathos), shading toward vi (irony iv)
Genre: Drama + Anatomy
Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

Where the story of Six Characters in Search of an Author takes place

  • A theatre stage in daytime during rehearsal, 1920s Italy (1921), the main setting
  • Embedded backstory: the Father's house, Madame Pace's dress shop, the garden with its fountain (1900 to 1921)

8 things that are true of Six Characters in Search of an Author, with the passage for each

  1. The play opens with the actors rehearsing a different Pirandello play, 'Mixing It Up'.

    They are about to rehearse a Pirandello play: Mixing it Up. [Il giuoco delle parti.]

  2. The Father says the characters have come to find any author.

    We have come here in search of an author . . .

  3. The Step-Daughter sings and dances a French chanson on the stage.

    Sings and then dances Prenez garde à Tchou-Tchin-Tchou.

  4. The Father says the Step-Daughter was offered one hundred lire in a pale blue envelope at Madame Pace's.

    There they were in a pale blue envelope on a little mahogany table in the back of Madame Pace's shop.

  5. The Manager agrees to be the author of the characters' drama.

    Well . . . I am almost tempted. It's a bit of an idea. One might have a shot at it.

  6. The Boy is discovered holding a revolver in his pocket before the end.

    catches the glint of a revolver.

  7. Madame Pace materializes after the actresses' hats are hung on pegs.

    There she is! There she is!

  8. The play ends with a gunshot offstage and the actors disagreeing about whether the Boy is dead.

    Some Actors. He's dead! Dead!

Scenes in Six Characters in Search of an Author that Frye would name

16 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Anatomy, untitled
Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. A philosophical digression on language and mutual incomprehension, typical of anatomy's intellectual ideology.
Anatomy, untitled
Our reality doesn't change: it can't change! It can't be other than what it is, because it is already fixed for ever. A sustained speech on illusion and reality, with the Manager objecting to the philosophizing.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Fortunately I recognized her . . . In time. And I took them back home with me to my house. The Father recognises the Mother at Madame Pace's, pivoting the backstory.
Sparagmos, untitled
I ran over to her; I was jumping in to drag her out when I saw something that froze my blood . . . The boy standing stock still, with eyes like a madman's, watching his little drowned sister The family is torn apart by a drowning and a shot, the visio malefica of the end.
Pathos, untitled
A revolver shot rings out behind the trees where the BOY is hidden. The sacrificial deaths of the innocent children close the play.
Lyric, untitled
Les chinois sont un peuple malin, De Shangai à Pekin, Ils ont mis des écriteaux partout An embedded song and dance interrupts the dialogue.

Books that share these scenes with Six Characters in Search of an Author

About the author

Luigi Pirandello