The Six Characters of Pirandello is a play that tries to explain the creative process to the public. The author used his characters to personify the various stages of a playwright's writing process, framing the action against the convenient backdrop of the stage. His characters are closely related to the Freudian structure of the human psyche, focusing primarily on the unifying characteristics of the superego, ego, and id (Merkur 31). However, Pirandello never explains that his characters are allegorical, and simply presents them to the audience as creations of the “instrument of human imagination” (Pirandello 6). He also indulged in hints of dark humor throughout the play, which only further masked the characters' true meanings. The audience is left with a feeling of fragmentation, as even the manager is unsure whether the characters are real or not. More importantly, the one character who could make sense of it all, The Author, is maddeningly absent. However, while the play may have been a precursor to the Theater of the Absurd movement, it has significance: Six Characters in Search of an Author is an allegory of a playwright who is struggling to bring his characters to light. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Before the entrance of the Six Characters, Pirandello prepares his audience by creating the scene for a play within a play. The stage is set to give the impression of incompleteness, a hint at the fractional nature of the work. While the manager struggles to control the cast, the audience is allowed a glimpse into the often comical complexity of the creative process. By the time the stage door opens to reveal the Six Characters, Pirandello has already begun to create the backdrop of uncertainty for the show. However, upon entering the scene, the Father character works quickly to establish a credible reason for his existence, appealing to the artistic sensibilities of the troupe. In this way the father's speech is addressed both to the audience and to the other actors on stage, while he acts as the main narrator. First, he proposes that the existence of the characters can be explained by accepting the human psyche as an actual plane of reality, where the characters are condemned to wander aimlessly until an Author gives them life. At this critical moment, Pirandello courts the audience's disbelief with a logical fallacy, while the father begins to construct a plausible scenario in which he could exist: “life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true” (Pirandello 5). Based on this piece of abstract logic, the author offers a reason for the presence of his characters. Pirandello instead vaguely assumes that characters submitted to the realm of imagination have the “inner passion” to be written (9). So, while the author took pains to explain the appearance of the characters, with a line of dialogue he completes the setting of the work using subterfuge rather than exposition. Having established his background, Pirandello gradually develops the plot in narrative flashes, often interrupted, while the characters tell their dramatic story. The troubled family's descriptions of the events are contradictory at best, and the conflicting perceptions seem to highlight their disjointed nature. The characters do not question the events themselves, but rather the motivations behind them, while the truth remains a mystery. The father, portrayed as a narratorhyper-rational and philosophical, it closely resembles the Superego of the human psyche. Although each character represents a phase of the creative process, the father is the main example of this personification. He is one of the most tenacious characters in the family's attempt to dramatize their story, and throughout the retelling of the drama, the father relentlessly defends each of his decisions with tortuous rationalization. Freud's superego structure is characterized by a predominant sense of morality and, jointly, of guilt. As the show progresses, it becomes apparent that the father, driven by both motivators, desperately wants his side of the story to be told. However, this only further ties it to the superego: "A confession not only gratifies the confessor's desire for punishment... but, by localizing the guilt in a subject, allows those who judge to displace and therefore satisfy their own need punishment" (Schmeiser 333). The father's dialogue is peppered with implications of these tendencies: “All my life I have had these confused aspirations towards a certain moral sanity” (Pirandello 17). Indulging his moralistic affectation, the father exemplifies how, within the creative process, the Superego tends to dictate the editing and manipulation of the story. In stark contrast to the father, the stepdaughter undoubtedly portrays the id in Freud's psychological construct. The stepdaughter is important for her sexual characterization and her unbridled laughter. No fewer than six times over the course of the play, the stepdaughter's hideous laughter is silenced by one of the other characters, which continues to accentuate her primal nature, as well as her disconnection from reality. The stepdaughter consistently responds to each admonition with painful martyrdom, but nevertheless embraces the sexual tendencies that mark the aspect of her assigned psyche. Like the id, the stepdaughter is fascinated by the visual elements of the story and often interrupts the father's narrative with information only marginally relevant to the visual context of the story. His descriptions of Madame Pace's shop, the blue envelope, and her schoolgirl attire all point to his obsession. Unruly and shameless, she is Dad's main antagonist in Six Characters. The stepdaughter constantly contradicts her father's perception of events and questions his delusion of morality. While the father rationalizes each of his motivations, the stepdaughter is content to throw the entire, sordid story before the director, while casting her stepfather in a very dark light. Ultimately, she is the character who drives the action of the plot and insists on pushing forward into each new and forbidding scene. The mother completes Freud's trinity of motivators. Signifying the ego, the mother has a tendency to play the role of mediator between father and stepdaughter. He embodies the emotion, filling in the details between the pretentious rationalizations and the bitter, unbridled laughter. The mother cries for the victims of the creative struggle, her discarded children. He is responsible for development, bringing new aspects of the story to life; as the father points out, "his drama... lies, in fact, entirely in these four children" (11). Together, the stepdaughter, mother and father symbolize inspiration, development and creativity in the creative process - the playwright's Holy Trinity. However, the Manager plays a crucial role as the editor of the story. While father, mother, and stepdaughter present the gritty details of the story, the manager is tasked with organizing this stream-of-consciousness narrative into a tolerable work. The characters object to the Manager's changes, but he responds with a simple statement: “The truth up to a certain point, but no further” (51). At the. 2013.