Characters in Search of an Term Paper

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Pirandello's self-conscious use of the nature of theater and the way people play roles in the theater and in family life was considered revolutionary at the time. His title "Six Characters in Search of an Author" stressed the fact that the fourth wall between the audience and the actors was being broken down in the construct of the drama itself, not merely alluded to, as in a Shakespearean soliloquy or a 'play within a play device' and within a family at war traditional roles, like father/son, father/stepdaughter are broken down.

Yet as revolutionary as he may seem, Pirandello's difficult family dynamics always recalls ancient Greece and Shakespeare as much as modernism and postmodernism, as in its invocation of the Orestes cycle where there is deep hate and alienation woven within the traditional family structure, the complex family dynamic of Oedipus, and the child-parent tensions of Hamlet. In the "Orestes" trilogy, to prove his own strength and honor his obligation to the men of Greece who wooed Helen, Agamemnon 'sends away' (to death) his own daughter, sacrificing her to the gods for a fair wind to Troy and earns the hatred of his wife Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra takes a lover and kills her first husband upon his return, and wins the hatred of her other daughter, Electra, and her son Orestes. Divorce and hatred are woven into the cycle, but in Pirandello, the infidelity is constructed, not by the gods, but by other humans using one another as puppeteers, in this case that of the woman's husband who urges his wife to transgress. Even the use of the 'play within a play' recalls "Hamlet," as do the angry and oedipal tensions between mother and son. There are also strong elements of the Italian commedia dell'arte in Pirandello's narrative, given its close family relationships, violent arguments, and the constant presence of prostitution, immorality, and threats to young women's virtue, viragos, harridans, and sudden, abrupt deaths.

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Pirandello thus takes multiple historical elements of how families and courtship have been viewed in the past in drama and challenges the viewer as to how he or she sees drama itself. Always, the complex and vague divides between family members has been present in unspoken tension -- does Oedipus give birth to daughters or sisters, is Hamlet the stepson of Claudius or his nephew -- and Pirandello takes these familial tensions, to some degree present in every reconstructed or dysfunctional family, and through the heightened nature of the stage, brings them into sharp relief. "Pirandello's presence on the stage serves the crucial purpose of insuring that his audience knows the stage for what it is: a stage. Putting himself there created a metaphor whose purpose was to draw the spectator's attention to the platform under his feet. Destruction of the spectator's 'belief' in the verisimilitude of stage event was the great innovation" of the play and through this deconstruction of belief in the family and the theater, simultaneously the viewer's own beliefs about fiction and about how a 'happy' family is created and recreated are challenged (Herman 98).. No one can leave the play entirely certain of whom or she is as a father, mother, sister, or brother.

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