Ontological Foregrounding in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author
Ontological Foregrounding in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author

Summary/Abstract: Pirandello’s twentieth-century play is so form-conscious and experimental in technique that it can be characterized as postmodernist. As the dominant of postmodernist literature, ontology has formed the poetics of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The poetics of his play foregrounds ontology: different ontological planes are conceived in its world. Each of these planes – ontologies – stands for a world. Moreover, ontological foregrounding signifies breaking the ontological boundaries between the worlds in the play, hence the confusion of ontologies. The result has been the coexistence of different ontologies that induces ontological instability and indeterminacy in the structure of the play. In fact, the world logic of the six characters does not meet with that of the Actors, and it brings about ambiguity and a(n)(ontological) tension between their worlds.

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