Realism in The Mark on the Wall and Six Characters in Search of an Author - Research Paper Example

Compare and Contrast Essay—Realism The Mark on the Wall and Six Characters in Search of an Author Upon reading the two works, the first thought that comes to one’s mind is the fact they are completely different in their subject matter. After all, Six Characters… is seemingly about an increasingly frustrated director trying to get a play’s rehearsal off the ground while six people show up who are not connected to the play and their strange behavior. Meanwhile “The Mark…” explores the thoughts of some person (sex unknown but sounding decidedly feminineness). This story concerns just the one person until the last two paragraphs. Originally written in Italian and performed in Rome, the six people are characters in a completely different story than the one the director is trying to rehearse. Dealing with very controversial subjects such as incest, extramarital affairs, prostitution, child murder, and suicide, the play caused uproars in its native Italy and again in New York when it premiered on Broadway in 1922. Then again, most of the taboo subject matter would no doubt also cause controversy in the twenty-first century! “The Mark…” is about an individual staring at a mark on a wall for an infinite amount of time (hole, notch or simple mark?). Judging by the time period it was written (1921) the protagonist is going through some sort of personal agony, possibly World War I. She appears to be feminine (the author was!) with a vast appreciation of the arts and is well educated and well read in Philosophy, as she seems to argue with herself for quite some time over apparently trivial subjects. The era in which both works was written is extremely important in determining the themes that they both share. They were composed within three years of the end of World War I. For those of us used to almost continuous global conflict it barely raises an eyebrow. But this was new to people in the early twentieth century, a worldwide war joined by over one hundred countries in which more than ten million service members were killed, not including the countless millions of civilians killed and severely injured. Its names of the Great War and the War to End All Wars were no coincidence. Added to that was the extra horror of bringing weapons of mass destruction like tanks and airplanes into play. Being Italian, Pirandello personally lived the horrors of the War and his sons were taken prisoner of war. Likewise Woolf, living in the relative safety of England, lost a brother-in-law to battle and another was severely wounded. “The Mark…” even mentions her revulsion of the War, “Curse this war; God damn this war!”. They both also dealt with the specter of mental illness in their personal lives. With sexual trauma early in her life, it is no great surprise that Woolf suffered the first of several major mental breakdowns in 1914, although it is believed that the author had suffered for years before that. She never fully recovered from these dark periods of insanity, which modern psychologists diagnose as probable bipolar disorder, and her illness was evident in her writings, which culminated in her suicide by drowning in 1941. As well, Pirandello dealt with mental disorders in his personal life. His wife suffered from a form of paranoia beginning in 1904, becoming progressively worse until he was forced to have her institutionalized in 1919, on the eve of Six Characters… So with so much horror visited on the both of them it is not surprising that they withdrew into the world of escapism and so much of their writing dealt with absurdity. The two works are intertwined in their lack of reality which is interposed in reality. Somebody sitting in their living room, on a winter’s day with a nice cup of tea and cigarette and reading a book is fixated by a mark on the wall. First of all the writer is grateful that the mark has interrupted her “flight of fancy” and brought her back to reality. She reasons it could be from a miniature, from the previous tenants, and speculates as to what it actually looked like. Yet throughout her reasoning, the author does not wish to rise and examine the mark, but in itself becomes her fantasy, her way from retreating from reality where “nothing is proved, nothing is known”. Yet she is jerked back to reality when her companion reveals that the mark that has taken her time is a snail! Six Characters… follows the same premise in that reality is a sham. Indeed, from their very first entrance in Act 1, Pirandello attempts to convince us of the "faint breath of their fantastic reality". The Father, in trying to convince the Manager to use their story, tells him that the Characters are "living beings more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes: beings less real perhaps, but truer!" At the end some say that the Child’s climatic death was pretense. "Pretence? Reality, sir, reality!" said the Father. By that time the Manager begins to doubt his own sanity and is exasperated by what he perceives as a waste of his time. Indeed, the whole premise of a fantastical play inside another play performed at the magic of theater is in itself an escape from reality. In conclusion, so it is that both authors use metaphors to escape from the terrible tidings of their own reality. To Woolf, the Colonel brings her back to reality by revealing that her time passer was a simple snail. In Pirandello’s case the Manager represents a cruel reality and the Characters his escape. Hence by understanding both authors’ loneliness and despair one could come to realize the mark/snail signifies the protagonist’s depression in “The Mark…” and even though the story line of Six Characters is totally different, one also realizes Pirandello is placing himself as the Manager. Like Woolf seeing the snail, his six people represent all the heartache he too has seen, so that one play more or less overlaps the other. WORKS CITED Pirandello, Luigi, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Norton Anthology of World Literature Volume F, New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, Print. Woolf, Virginia, The Mark on the Wall, University of Pennsylvania, Web, May 11, 2012, < http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/English104/woolf1.html >. Read More