Chapter 25 - History

Summary

In the novel The Old and the Young, as well in many of his short stories, Pirandello, like Nietzsche, aims at undermining humankind’s faith in history. Life and world events are ruled by chance, according to Pirandello; since history is a fictional creation dependent on the ideology and feelings of the historian, writing it makes no sense. This is why one character in the short story “Interviews with Characters” tells the writer to concentrate instead on what really counts, the joy and suffering of even one real individual with whom readers can identify. This approach can be seen in the stories written with World War I as their backdrop: In one, for instance, Pirandello’s own anguish about his sons going off to fight is mirrored in the story of Marco Leccio, who must witness his sons’ departure for a conflict he thinks should be fought by the fathers as the completion of Italian unification because it was for his generation, not his sons’, that Austrians were enemies. Perhaps this skepticism about history’s ability to teach us anything was what made Pirandello deaf to the dangers of Fascism.