The Father announces that the Characters were “born of an author’s fantasy” but “denied life by him.” And yet they take life on their own and insist on staging their drama-that is, becoming the authors of their own destiny, controlling the meaning of their existence. The conflict over authorship in this play is fundamentally an argument about who controls the meaning of a text, and the Characters’ frustrations and attempts to get revenge on their author demonstrate how they gained their own consciousness and became independent of him. According to Pirandello, works of art and their meanings spring not from a single, directed consciousness but from a collaborative and often conflicted process of cobbling together stories and meaning.

As the Characters seek their author and struggle for control (authorship) of the narrative they are piecing together with the Actors and Manager, the audience or reader learns that authorship is not about an otherworldly, ingenious process of creating something out of nothing. This process showed him that his creations were not entirely his own: rather, his characters became independent beings that lived in his imagination and gradually forced him to write out their “drama.” The drama he creates is, in fact, the story of this whole process, played out on stage. But they took on a life of their own and began to haunt him while he worked on other projects. In his Preface to the 1925 version of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello revealed that the six Characters at the heart of the play were his own creations, and that he was the author who abandoned them more than a decade earlier after failing to place them in an adequate story.

Characters in search of an author