A Deconstructive Reading on Luigi Pirandello‘s Six Characters in Search of an Author

Abstract

This paper is a deconstructive reading of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. The pivotal maxim of deconstruction is the paradoxical nature of language and the unwanted contradictory statements. According to deconstructionists, such contradictory statements are produced in all situations that use language as the medium of communication. Any deconstructive reading will focus on dissenting voices, contradictions, oppositions, and paradoxes. This study also concentrates on the paradoxes embedded in the Six Characters in terms of first, discovering the binary oppositions on which the text tries to build itself, second, challenging and questioning the reliability of such oppositions, third, trying to turn them upside down and, finally, holding them in suspense to reach to an impossible path or an ‘aporia’ where it is impossible to decide. So, the text remains finally unreadable and undecidable, any reading being necessarily a misreading. Since deconstruction is not a method or strategy outside the text to be imposed on it but a way to trace the labyrinth of the text to reveal how it has already dismantled and deconstructed itself, this study is no parasitic means of reading the text brought upon it from outside. Rather, it is a careful trial to follow the twists of the Six Characters and to show how it asserts contradictory opinions concerning identity, the concept of author, text, actor, etc. to prove finally that the text affirms paradoxical assertion and therefore, it affirms nothing. It tries to prove that the Six Characters as an extended stretch of language is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

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