Six Characters in Search of an Author

Giving form to a story is both a literary art and something we do with our lives to create meaning. The play explores both ideas of authorship in different ways. The premise of the play is that the characters are searching for a playwright to author their play because “the author who created [them] alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put [them] into a work of art” (5). The absence of the author allows Luigi Pirandello to consider what happens to a creation when it is out of the author’s control. While the author, “the instrument of the creation,” will “die,” the “creation does not die (5, 6). The Manager, named the author of the character’s drama, is left in charge of the story, but in the end, he loses control of the creation. This loss of control reflects the author’s inability to completely control a work.

Throughout the play, the Father, the Step-Daughter, and the Manager attempt to act as the author of the play. The Father argues for a more philosophical type of authorship. He espouses many ideas that explain and contextualizes his actions. The Step-Daughter authors a story that is driven by emotion and spectacle: She seeks to make her trauma visible to her

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