The Nature of Truth
Pirandello’s entire career—but especially the plays included in this collection—is one revealing an obsession with the nature of truth. At the center of these plays are examinations of the line blurring reality and illusion, the perceptual obstructions and difficulties in determining where this line is located and how identity is established based on one’s perspective. Right You Are (If You Think You Are) presents an unsolvable paradox in which a woman is presented as two distinct people who cannot co-exist in the same person yet somehow does. The play twists upon the concept of how both can be true despite this paradoxical fact.
Trappings of Self-Identity
Self-identity and imposition that one places upon the fragmented portrayal that is presented to the world is also explored to a certain degree in each of the plays included here. The theme is most notably presented in Henry IV which is about a modern-day figure who appears to be living under the delusion that he is the Holy Roman Emperor from the Middle Ages. Those around him are thus compelled to fulfill this delusion by constructing an artificial world to meet his psychosis. The twist, however, is that he is fully aware of the false persona rather than living a delusion. The twist on the twist occurs when he commits an act forces him to remain forever living inside his seemingly deluded state let his revelation of the truth result in his imprisonment for murder.
The Creative Process
In both the plays and the prose essays which comprise this text, a major theme is an examination of the creative process. This theme is explore tangentially through the invention of the false identity of the title character in Henry IV. Pirandello’s most famous play—Six Characters in Search an Author—is completely about the relationship between the writer and fictional creations. How that play relates to this theme is further explored in a separate essay in which Pirandello tells how the idea for this play initially began as material for his next novel brought to him in the form of an introduction to the characters by his imaginary muse which he names Fantasy.
