Pirandello, Luigi - Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (essay date 1978)
Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "The Jests of Love and Death," in The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello's Narrative Writings, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978, pp. 108-22.
[An American educator and critic, Radcliff-Umstead is the author and editor of numerous studies of Romance literature. In the following excerpt, he analyzes some of Pirandello's later short stories, to which the critic attributes a distinctly mythic quality. ]
Several of Pirandello's final novelle—written during the years of his most intense theatrical activity—reveal a desire to evade everyday reality in a higher plane of experience. What was examined in earlier tales like "Quand'ero matto" of 1901 as an escape into insanity became a mythic realm that the novelistic characters longed to enter. The dream world of these later tales recalls the higher reality that the contemporary school of French surrealists wished to...
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