Essay Questions

Show how reality versus imagination is contrasted in Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal.

Reality and imagination are deeply contrasted in the work by Pirandello. As Pascal grows up, he quickly learns about the truth to life, and that is, the fact that not everything happens as one wishes or imagines it to happen. As a young man, Pascal is of the idea that he would later marry a woman she found befitting of his status. However, the reality becomes very different from how he imagined it when he actually marries a woman that he does not love and even loses two of his daughters. In this way, the writer contrasts these two themes.

Show how the writer brings out the aspect of readjustment after a loss in Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal.

After Pascal is pronounced as dead, he goes on to visit his family probably as a way of showing them or revealing to them the fact that he is alive and not dead as earlier presumed. The writer shows how the community accepted the loss and moved on without him. Due to his earlier decision to run away from home, Pascal’s family has to readjust to life without him, to the loss and as such he has to live on as an outcast.

Show how the concept of freedom is emphasized in Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal.

Freedom or the lack thereof is a concept that is well brought out in The Late Mattia Pascal. Because Pascal has been forced, in order to conform to societal rules and expectations, to wear a certain persona, he longs to break free from this kind of bondage. As a result of this need to be free, he lives two completely varied lives. Even though he manages living as Adriano, he is unable to turn this existence as Adriano to an identity as such.