A Tenuous Light: Analyzing the Creative Process Through Six Characters in Search of an Author Anonymous College

Pirandello’s Six Characters is a play that tries to explain the creative process to the audience. The author used his characters to personify the various stages of a playwright’s writing process, while framing the action against the convenient backdrop of the stage. His characters most closely correlate to Freud’s structure of the human psyche, focusing mainly on the unifying characteristics of the superego, ego, and id (Merkur 31). However, Pirandello never explains that his characters are allegorical, and simply presents them to the audience as creations of “the instrument of human fantasy” (Pirandello 6). He also indulged in hints of dark humor found throughout the play, which only masked the characters' true meanings even further. The audience is left with the feeling of fragmentation, as even the Manager is unsure whether the characters are real or not. Most importantly, the one character that could make sense of it all, The Author, is maddeningly absent. Nevertheless, while the play may have been a precursor to the Theatre of the Absurd movement, it does have meaning: Six Characters in Search of an Author is an allegory for a playwright who is struggling to bring his characters to light.

Before the entrance of the Six...