47 pages • 1 hour read
Luigi Pirandello, Transl. Edward StorerSix Characters in Search of an Author
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1921A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act 3Act Summaries & Analyses
Act 3 Summary
When the curtain rises again, the set has been adjusted so that a backdrop with trees hangs and a fountain basin is onstage. The characters are on one side and the actors on the other. The Manager is in the middle of the stage, mediating the staging of the next act.
The Step-Daughter feels it is impossible to stage the whole act in the garden because some parts involving the Son and the Boy took place indoors. The Manager explains that they cannot change scenery so many times in an act. The Leading Lady adds that it makes the illusion easier to maintain, but the Father becomes irritated with her word choice as he feels illusion is painful and insulting. The Manager asks what other word they should use, as theater is about creating the illusion of reality. The Father understands, but points out that the actors are pretending while this is reality for the characters.
The Father asks the Manager to explain who he is. When the Manager identifies as himself, the Father points out how frustrating it would be if someone told the Manager he was not the Manager. That is what the characters are experiencing in this process. They debate the nature of identity.
When the Manager jokes that the Father will say that the character’s drama is more true and real than the Manager is, the Father agrees. The characters are more real because they do not change from day to day like the actors’ lives do. The Manager objects that change is normal, but the Father insists that the characters “lives” don’t change because they are fixed. The fleeting quality of the actors and Manager’s lives, he argues, actually makes their lives the illusion. The Manager asks that the Father stop philosophizing, especially since he introduced the group as characters in search of an author to make a play. The Manager accuses the Father of imitating Pirandello’s ideas.
The Manger is frustrated with the Father’s determination to convince them that they are the characters themselves. The Father says that he must represent himself because he seeks truth, while the Step-Daughter is focused on factual accuracy. The Manager worries they will never finish with both the Father and the Step-Daughter constantly interrupting.
The Manager describes how the events and details of the characters’ drama will be combined into one tight plot point in one setting. Instead of being in various locations, all the characters will be in one place at the same time. After the Step-Daughter describes the importance of the garden, the Manager chooses to set the action in the garden.
The Manager rearranges the set before worrying about where they will find a child actor to play the Boy. He tries to add some lines for the Boy, but he refuses to speak. The Step-Daughter explains he will not speak in front of the Son. The Son goes to leave, but the Manager stops him. The Mother, terrified that the Son is leaving, stands up to stop him, too. The Son insists he has nothing to do with the drama.
The Father tries to get the Son to act in the garden scene, but the Son refuses. The Step-Daughter explains how the Son is unable to leave and then demonstrates. She then draws attention to the Mother, who continues to beg the Son to stay, as an example of a character willing to play their part. She then tries to get the others in their places, like the Child in the fountain.
The Second Lady and the Juvenile Lead begin to study the movements of the Mother and the Son. The Son questions why the scenes are happening at once because there was no conversation between himself and the Mother. The Mother concurs, but the Manager exasperatedly repeats how they must group the action. The Son notices the actors studying them and reacts angrily. He feels it is impossible to perceive something physically visible in front of a person. The Manager agrees and asks the actors to stop.
The Son tries to leave again, but the Manager demands he does the scene with the Mother. Yet when the Mother begins describing the scene, the Son insists again that there was no scene and he left. Even when the Father asks him to do it for the Mother’s sake, the Son still refuses. Tensions escalate between the Son and the Father while the Mother pleads for them to calm down.
The Son demands to know why they want to stage the family’s shame. When the Manager asks why the Son even came with them, the Son explains that the Father made the whole group come and invented multiple things. The Manager asks him to tell him what really happened. The Son says that he went out of his room to the garden without speaking to avoid causing a scene. The Manager is intrigued by his hesitancy to describe what happened in the garden.
The Son is exasperated with the Manager’s insistence, and the Mother begins sobbing. The Manager slowly realizes that something happened to the Child.
The Son continues his story. As the story builds, the characters act out his description. When he sees the Child in the fountain, the Son runs to get her while the Mother follows him. But before he gets to the Child, he sees the Boy staring at the drowned Child. The Boy walks off and a shot rings out. The Boy dies by suicide, and the Mother cries out.
The Manager and the actors are confused by the scene and are unclear whether it is real or performed. Some actors carry the Boy’s body off. The Father says it is real. The Manager dismisses the question, instead bemoaning the loss of a rehearsal day.
Act 3 Analysis
The raising of the curtain contrasts with the other acts’ beginnings. This conventional start suggests that this act is a performance and is more “theatrical” than the first two. The blurring of real life and performance at the start of the act underscores the confusion that ensues in the events of the act.
The rearranged scenery includes a drop. The drop reflects theater’s artificiality. While it appears to be an outdoor setting, it is simply a flat drawing on a cloth. The Manager and the Step-Daughter’s conflict over staging reflects their differing approaches to theater and storytelling. In her understanding of authorship, the Step-Daughter argues for physical accuracy. She insists that “you can’t have the whole action take place in the garden” because it “isn’t possible” (42). The Manager, on the other hand, uses theatrical storytelling conventions to shape the events. A play “can’t change scenes three or four times in one act” (42). These differing approaches mirror the Step-Daughter’s view of their story as her life and the Manager’s view of the drama as a story.
When the Leading Lady describes theatrical conventions as making “the illusion easier,” the Father criticizes her word choice because he finds it “painful” and “cruel” (42). As the Father described earlier in the play, the word illusion is being interpreted differently. The Leading Lady uses it to describe successful theater that connects with an audience’s emotions. For the Father, the word is an insult that reduces his life to something fake.
The Father articulates the nature of identity and how it differs from theatrical representation. Acting means that one who “naturally is himself, has to be” someone else (43). Acting is contrary to self-creation because it is a “game of art” where everyone is “all making believe” (43). A character has “a life of his own” with “especial characteristics” that make him “always ‘somebody’” (43). Because of the fluidity of a person’s identity, they are a “nobody” (43). The appearance of one identity is simply a collection of “illusions that mean nothing” as they go through their lives (43).
The characters “have no other reality beyond the illusion” (44), unlike real life people, and yet the Father argues that the human experience is more illusory than the characters’ lives. He points to how when people “reflect” and look back, they do not recognize themselves because they have changed (44). This suggests that the human identity is fluid and that, as a result, “this you as you feel it today—all this present reality of yours—is fated to seem mere illusion to you tomorrow” (44). In contrast, the characters’ “realit[ies] [don’t] change” (44). For the Father, because a human has “no other reality beyond the illusion,” their reality as they “feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, [...] may prove an illusion [...] tomorrow” (44). The Father argues that that must then mean that the characters “are truer and more real than” the Manager (44). The Manager did not “understand that from the beginning,” explaining much of the disagreement between the two characters throughout the play.
The Father describes the writing process from his own perspective. He imagines the author as a tool for creation because “[w]hen the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action” (46). Because of this collaboration, “authors, as a rule, hide the labour of their creations” and a character “acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him” (46). The lack of an author after the characters birth prevents the characters from living. The Father, the Step-Daughter, and the Mother have all “tried him in turn” to continue the play (46). The Father talked with him, and the Step-Daughter “sought to tempt him” (46). These differing techniques are reflective of their personalities and associated emotions.
Despite his desire to do so, the Son “can’t go away” (49). Because the author has begun to write the story, the Son is “obliged to stay” (50). The Step-Daughter taunts him: His story, though not fully realized, has been written and consigns him to his fate. The Son and the Step-Daughter share inverted storylines with their families; the estranged son is “indissolubly bound” to his family (49), while the Step-Daughter loses her family and she flees.
The Son reiterates his refusal to participate. This refusal has a double meaning, which echoes the binaries and mirroring throughout the play. He says he doesn’t “care for scenes” (51). He means that he did not want to cause an emotional ruckus but also refers to his dislike for participating in the drama being enacted. His refusal to make the scene also denies the audience the emotional climax a reunion would represent. The use of “nothing” also reflects the differing definitions of words used by characters throughout the play. While no actions or dialogue occur, the absence of a reunion is something. This something both causes the Mother torment and extends the Son’s estrangement.
The long-discussed culmination of the drama unfolds chaotically. The conflict between the Father and the Son breaks out into spontaneous aggression. The Boy, without any warning, acts out his death by suicide. The Mother screams. Because the Son narrates the events, he builds tension for the actors and the Manager. But his narration also acts as a distancing effect for the audience, who cannot be swept up in the emotion of the scene because of the narration of an observer. The stage directions outline the actions of the other characters but do not list any actions for the Son, suggesting that he may still be doing nothing and refusing to participate in the scene.
The play ends with a return to the play’s central thematic concerns. The actors and the larger audience are left unsure as to whether the characters are pretending or if the actions they saw are real. The Father, as a representative of the characters, insists that it is “reality” (52). Some of the actors carry away the Boy, suggesting they, too, might think it is real, but other actors cry out that “it’s only make believe, it’s only pretence” (52).
The Manager ends the play with what may be Pirandello’s point: “To hell with it all!” (52).
