characters and their actors, and even directors, and so infil-
trates every aspect of the creative process.

But the power of the character as a generating force behind
these narratives is only a part of the story. It leads into the
question of what makes a literary character, whether they are
'people' in any intelligible sense. Much of the book is taken up
with a study of the plethora of life-histories that Pirandello's
fictions provide, of how characters make and unmake each
other, and themselves. He shows characters, usually men,
pinned down by the surfeit of information that the community
has about them, and others, usually women, who without a past
that is public knowledge struggle without success to know them-
selves. What his characters have in common is their investment
in the spoken word. The word is action, only through language
can they realize themselves--la parola viva ('the living word').
Whatever the genre, short story, novel, poem, or play,
Pirandello's characters seek to tell, often painfully, not always
articulately, their life-story, struggling through the spoken word
and therefore through their interlocutor to make sense of
themselves.

-vii-