Misidentifications in Pirandello's Plays and Short Stories

Abstract

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, short story writer, poet, and one of the leading dramatists of the twentieth century. Pirandello used his plays and short stories to express his life philosophy which included the irony and bitterness of self-deception. In his works, his characters possess highly complex personalities, portrayed by ongoing and overlapping conflicts between illusion and reality. These manifestations of double personalities and confusion between imagination and reality are today known as psychopathological phenomena, classified as both delusional misidentification and reduplication syndromes. Here, individuals misidentify and reduplicate places, people, or events. These delusional syndromes (Capgras, Frégoli, intermetamorphosis, syndrome of subjective doubles) occur primarily in psychiatric illnesses (i.e. schizophrenia) and organic illnesses (i.e. right hemispheric stroke). For Pirandello, reality was highly subjective in all humans. However, misidentification and reduplication syndromes can manifest when this subjectivity gets out of control. With his works, Pirandello made philosophical concepts which had previously only been discussed by intellectuals available to a much larger audience. Pirandello continued to elaborate upon this concept of mutable ego, established by Blaise Pascal in the 1600s and carried on by the French psychologist Alfred Binet.