Six Characters in Search of an Author

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Recommended: Notion of education in theater and drama in education

Luigi Pirandello’s play is deemed by many literary critics to be a significant play that greatly changed how the world literature is currently viewed. The play’s plot and its dramatic setting puzzled the literary critics and the audiences that watched it because it deviated from the literary canons of play writing as many knew them. The play sets of as a realistic play and thus Pirandello introduces six individuals who allege that they are an imperfect although self-determining outcomes of an author’s imagination. The characters allege that their author disposed of them before they could be perfect characters in a complete play. They further alleged that their story was incomplete because their acting had been terminated prematurely. They asserted that they were more genuine than the other characters that were to be used in narrating their story. In this regard, the six characters asserted that they were on the theatre stage searching for an author who was going to complete their story. They wanted a literary existence that their former author had deprived of them. This play deviated from the known literary conventions because there could never be characters without an author because every author often created his own (Altman 5). Using Michel Foucault’s theory; From Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; this paper is aimed at criticising Pirandello’s play.
Foucault’s theory
In his theory, Foucault uses the corrective institution at Mettray to describe the panoptic structure that human beings were often introduced to by the society. The panoptic society that Foucault was trying to describe had a prison, religious structures, career training institutes and schools that were aimed at generating a school of knowledge that wa...

... middle of paper ...

...or a utility that is essential in play writing.

Works Cited
Altman Joshua. Six Characters in Search of an Author: Adapting and Directing a Modern Drama for a Contemporary Audience. Tufts University: A Senior Honours Thesis Capstone Project for the Department of Drama and Dance. 2009.
Foucault Michel. Discipline and Punish: Panopticism. 1975. NY: Vintage Books 1995.
Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author. Nick Hern Books: New York, 1922.
Pirandedllo, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author. 1921. 21 December 2013 .
Shapiro Stephen. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2002. Accessed 21/12/2013 http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fullli st/second/en229/marxfctintros_/foucault_reader.pdf

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