Author's Council

Question to Pirandello: I brought you to this debate precisely because of “One, No One, and one hundred thousand “ . Did you state there basically the multiplicity of Ids or manifestations of Ego men really have?

Pirandello nods slowly—this time without irony.

“Yes. That book was the purest distillation of what I had discovered: that the self is not one—and perhaps is not at all. Vitangelo Moscarda, the protagonist, believes himself to be a single, coherent being. Then a casual remark—his wife telling him that his nose tilts—shatters his illusion. He begins to see that every person who knows him sees a different ‘him.’ A hundred thousand versions. None match the one he believes himself to be.”

He gestures lightly, but his voice now carries philosophical precision: “You ask whether this is simply a multiplicity of egos—yes, in part. But it goes deeper. The human ‘I’ is not a stable lord seated on a throne of personality. It is a flickering awareness suspended between how we wish to be seen, how others force us to be seen, and the strange being we encounter when we remove all masks.”

He leans forward. **“One”—the illusion of a single self we cling to. **“No one”—the terrifying void discovered when our false identities collapse. “One hundred thousand”—the countless masks we wear in the minds of others.

“In literature, most characters are written as though they are ‘one’—unified. Some great writers, like Balzac and Shakespeare, admit they are ‘many’—contradictory, complex. But very few dare to confront the possibility that the self might be truly unstable—that characters, like people, are not beings but processes.”

Then he answers your question directly: “Is this psychology? Partly. But it is also ontology—a question of being. A writer who ignores the fragmentation of self writes puppets. A writer who sees it can write tragedy.”

He pauses. “So yes—‘One, No One and One Hundred Thousand’ states the law that governs all my work: identity is a fiction we negotiate with others, and collapse is always waiting.”

Question: I want to ask you another question. Because sometimes I understand writing is a laborious task creating characters one by one, but in your Book Six Characters in Search of an Author, I seem to understand that is not it. That in fact they, the characters appear in your mind, your creative mind, without any grueling effort on your side

“Exactly. You have seen the paradox. There are two kinds of writers: those who construct characters from the outside—methodically, brick by brick—and those for whom characters arrive already alive, demanding to exist.”

He lightly taps the table. “In Six Characters in Search of an Author I revealed something most writers hide for fear of being considered mad: characters sometimes come uninvited. Fully formed. Burning with their own inner necessity. They do not ask to be created—they insist upon it.”

He raises his eyes to the room. “This is why I do not fully trust theories of character that reduce writing to technique. Technique is necessary, yes, but life precedes technique.”

Then he answers you precisely:

"Where do these characters come from? Not from reason. Not from planning. They come from the unconscious—the deep furnace where memory, trauma, desire, observation, and imagination churn together until suddenly, a soul emerges.”