Chapter 22 - The Anti-Character

Summary

The chapter locates Pirandello’s characters against the backdrop of modernist culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche’s reflections on the multiple nature of the “I,” Pirandello’s construction of his characters proves fully in tune with contemporary developments in European thinking. When dealing with such fictional characters as Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda, Pirandello goes for an anti-heroic approach to their relationship with history as opposed to nineteenth-century Romantic heroism. Theatre characters, on the other hand, escape definitions and roles to the extent that they become Nobody, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Binet, and Blondel’s reflections on psychology and freedom.