Chapter 33 - Suicide

Summary

This chapter examines works of Pirandello that feature the act of suicide against the backdrop of a historical epoch in which the issue of taking one’s own life was critical and culturally charged. Some of the suicides of the age were heroic self-immolators, as Carlo Michelstaedter appeared to many to be. Some were simply in desperate existential straits. Still others were women suffering intolerably in erotic relationships. The last two groups abound in Pirandello’s literary fictions, and he shares deep sympathy for them in approximately two dozen stories, many of which are analyzed closely here for their ethical and philosophical implications. Even more interesting “Pirandellian suicides” are symbolic ones, like Vitangelo Moscarda and Mattia Pascal in the novels. These characters reject, but do not end, the lives they have known before the narratives take their turns, producing the radical vitality of a non-life by bourgeois standards.