SOURCE: "Pirandello's Six Characters and Surrealism," in A Companion to Pirandello Studies, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 185-92.

An affinity has often been seen between the theater of Pirandello and the surrealist mode because both adhere to such notions as the "absurd," the unconventional, the iconoclastic, and the shocking to stir the receivers of the created work. Let us examine these elements from the angle of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as well as of the surrealists' position, to determine the nature of affiliations and of differences.

Pirandello has made it clear that the story of the characters is not his primary interest, nor is the philosophical question of reality versus illusion. His play is thought become theatric.

—Lander MacClintock, in The Age of Pirandello, 1951.

Undeniably, his reception in Paris had much to do with Pirandello's subsequent fame. He wrote Six Characters...