Luigi Pirandello – Six Characters in Search of an Author

• Theme: Meta-theatre and fragmented identity.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author explodes theatrical conventions to reveal the fundamental instability of subjectivity and narrative. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s later philosophy—especially his focus on discourse, subject formation, and the limits of authorial power—this play becomes not only a modernist provocation but a philosophical staging of the death of the Author (in anticipation of Barthes) and the dissolution of identity into performative multiplicities.

Foucault’s notion of the subject as produced through discursive practices is illuminated in every encounter between the six fictional Characters and the actors who attempt to rehearse them. The Characters do not “exist” in the ontological sense; rather, they are discursive residues, fragments left behind by an absent Author-God who never completed their story. Their insistence that they are “more real” than the actors enacts Foucault’s idea that identity is not interior essence, but externalized position in a field of statements.

Moreover, the play enacts what Foucault calls the “historico-transcendental doublet”—that is, the modern subject who is both the condition of knowledge and the object of its inquiry. The Characters both are their own truths and yet seek validation from an external structure (the theatre, the Director, the Author). This split dramatizes the epistemic fracture at the heart of the modern era: we are called to be self-knowing and self-governing, yet our very being is constituted by forces we cannot master.

Pirandello also anticipates Foucault’s concern in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self with the techniques of subjectivation—the ways in which individuals are shaped by norms, expectations, and power/knowledge systems. The Characters are tragic because they are trapped in their own stories, unable to revise their fate. They have been subjectivized, frozen in a moment of narrative violence: incest, suicide, shame. Their trauma is ontological, not merely psychological. They are condemned to repetition without redemption.

The “play within a play” format destabilizes all hierarchy between actor and character, reality and fiction, echoing Foucault’s skepticism about regimes of truth. The theatre becomes a panopticon of mirrors, a device not for producing certainty but for illuminating the artifice of all identity.

In this way, Six Characters serves as a metaphysical stage for Foucault’s notion that the self is a fiction that becomes real through repetition, surveillance, and performance. It is not what we are, but what we continually enact.