الفهرس 
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Abstract
Therefore, ”Luigi Pirandello is one of the truly great names of the modern theater. His plays have been and are still being performed in many countries and in many languages, and they have been widely acclaimed both by the public and by the critics”. (Bishop 21) Pirandello is one of the pioneering writers in using the play-within-a play technique. In Henry IV, the technique is further extended to more than one play at a time, like a labyrinth of performances where one does not know which is real and which is acting. Pirandello also cleverly blends tragedy and comedy; they are presented as indispensable, as well as inseparable, aspects of one’s existence in a way that makes his audience speculate upon their own existence. For example, in Right You Are, the audience concurrently laugh at the old woman and empathize with her. Similarly, in Six characters and Henry IV, the protagonists’ miseries are mingled with the absurdity of their situations. In this sense, Pirandello’s theater shares aspects with the theatre of the absurd, especially in the use of ”mythical, allegorical, and dreamlike modes of thought- the projection into concrete terms of psychological realities.” (Esslin 339) When The Father in Six characters says ”life is full of infinite absurdities”, one can easily hear Luigi Pirandello’s voice in this declaration. It is a statement of what Pirandello has always tried to prove, if he actually cared to prove anything. His drama typically resembles a world that does not have facts, meaning or purpose. It reflects life as Pirandello knows it; meaningless and futile. Therefore, many of the Pirandellian protagonists’ philosophical opinions about existence may be attributed to the author himself. Additionally, ”Pirandello is concerned first and last with a condition of life, an idea, embodied in a magnificent personage, not with personal ills and gothic pities.”(Bassnett 83) Accordingly, his characters are down-to-earth, non-heroic and extremely mediocre; drama lies in the stories of characters not the characters themselves.
Moreover, one could see a mix up of all life’s paradoxes and binary oppositions in Luigi Pirandello’s theater. In Henry IV, Pirandello successfully and skillfully depicts a world of masks, as Henry himself is a figure who is not personalized until the very end of the play. Henry IV is given this name from a masquerade he had contributed in, yet he possesses no identity. Ironically, ”the masquerade that has been a trivial joke for the participants became a bitter joke, a reality, for the man whose head struck a stone and who was left with the insane belief that he was Henry IV.” (Barnet et al. 279) The fact that one does not know the real name of the protagonist all through the performance and that the pretense is similar to a vicious circle where the end is a myth, proves Pirandello’s theory of naked masks. People are hidden behind fake identities and their existence is a temporary pending parallel of life. Thus, ”the Pirandellian characters do not merely intuit the irrationality of the human condition; they achieve a deep understanding of it, and thereby arrive at their definitive alienation.” (Mariani 116) They achieve this understanding through painful experiences that are usually completed via tenacious, ardent reasoning, which, Pirandello claims, is an ordinary activity of those who agonize. Pirandello believes that if people were unable to conceal their real identity, they would eternally be cursed. Thus, Henry says ”Woe to him who doesn’t know how to wear his mask, be he king or pope!” (6) In his foreword of Domenico Vittorini’s book, The Drama of luigi Pirandello, Pirandello summarizes how he sees himself, calling attention to the fact that it is only a relative and subjective opinion. He says, ”A man, I have tried to tell something to other men, without any ambition, except perhaps that of avenging myself for having been born. And yet life, in spite of all that it has made me suffer, is so beautiful.” (10) These words mirror Luigi Pirandello’s belief that life is like an antagonist that one may hate, yet cannot do without. He is torn between his love of life and his struggle to stay afloat in a world that constantly tried to crush him down.