Before his death Pirandello hoped to write a novella for each day of the year and to gather them in the series Novelle per un anno (Stories for a year). By 1937, the year after the writer's death, fifteen volumes had appeared in print. In all the author succeeded in completing 233 tales. The earliest story dates from his seventeenth year, and the final surrealistic dream stories belong to the last five years of the writer's life. Before being included in volumes, many of the tales originally appeared on the story page of major daily Italian newspapers like Milan's Corriere della sera as well as the provincial Giornale di Sicilia. The writer directed his stories to a reading public of the professional and semi-professional middle class, for whom the novellas were intended as little mirrors of their aspirations and frustrations.

In composing his tales, Pirandello had behind him the long Italian narrative tradition of novelistic art that arose in the late thirteenth century and early attained near perfection with Boccaccio's Decameron of 1350. The stories tend to concentrate on a single central event that determines the course of the protagonist's life by exposing the main character's inner strengths or weaknesses. Pirandello had before him the recent literary experience of his fellow Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), whose collections Vita dei campi (Life of the Fields, 1880) and Novelle rusticane (Rustic Tales, 1883) marked the shift of emphasis in the novella from exterior action and verbal witticism, as in Boccaccio's tales, to an examination of inner motivation and the influence of environment. Both Verga and his Sicilian compatriot Luigi Capuana (1839-1915) were associated with verismo, the literary school of regional realism that stressed fidelity to truth. Many of Pirandello's tales study the same insular Sicilian world as is depicted in the narrative works of Verga and Capuana. Despite the veristic aim to achieve objectivity, all three Sicilian authors display a fatalistic attitude that seems to be inherent to the novella and that distinguishes it from the regional short stories of other nations like Russia or the American South. The art of the novella lends itself to an irrational presentation of life, where chance or fate strikes the protagonist. With his humoristic vision Pirandello represented life as a cruel practical joke, and his tales are histories of the jests that mock his characters.

Neither in the early volumes nor in the definitive editions of the Novelle per un anno is any attempt made to place the tales in a frame story as occurs in the Decameron. Pirandello realized that in the twentieth century encircling the chaotic material of life in a harmonious frame would have been artistically false. Instead, his novellas should be experienced as isolated moments of intense agony or brutal irony as filtered through humorism. The wretched characters in the world of his tales appear as calculating peasants, hypocritical clergymen, disillusioned artists, game-playing entrepreneurs, lonely students, shrewd lawyers, disappointed war veterans, unfulfilled teachers, exploited sulfur miners, reactionary aristocrats, neglected wives, unloved children, and the elderly longing only to die. For the settings of his tales, Pirandello moved from the fetid peasant huts of his earliest veristic tales of Sicily to the swarming tenements of modern Rome in the stories of his midcareer to the apartments of black Harlem and Jewish Brooklyn in his final novellas. Quite often the scene takes place in a train compartment, usually second class, or a railroad station restaurant where the restless reach out in vain to each other. A large number of characters suffer from myopia, both physical and (by symbolic extension) spiritual, and are thereby hampered in their quest for selfrealization. Whatever the social roles may be, wherever the tale is set, the characters frequently remain separate from each other. The stories can be classified according to certain predominating themes or situations; fables where animals stare with amazement at the inane rituals of human life; graveyard tales with obligatory scenes in cemeteries or at funerals; stories of nihilism that explode in violence; pictures of life's barrenness often ending in suicide; exposés of the falseness of bourgeois customs (especially in marriages); and visions of a super-reality transcending everyday experience.

Even in his earliest stories, Pirandello tended toward dramatic enactment of scene. Indirect discourse is almost totally missing as lively dialogue or interior monologue (in the first or third person) take its place. As some critics have pointed out, there exists in Pirandello's narrative writing an entire language of silence made up of nonverbal communication through gestures and expressions of the eyes as well as represented voice inflections. Syntax, the use of tenses, and the choice of verbal modes (particularly the subjunctive to express emotional expectations) all contribute to creating a language of deception, to oneself and others, that Pirandello's humoristic art unmasks.

Between 1894 and 1920, before the writer conceived the plan for the comprehensive Novelle per un anno, Pirandello published his stories in volumes with antithetical titles like Amori senza amore (Loves Without Love) Beffe della morte e della vita (Jests of Death and Life); Quand'ero matto (When I Was Mad) Bianche e nere (White and Black) Erma bifronte (The Two-faced Herrn); La Vita nuda (Naked Life) Terzetti (Tercets) Le due maschere (The Two Masks) La Trappola (The Trap) Erba del nostro orto (Grass from Our Garden) E domani, lunedì (And Tomorrow, Monday) Un cavallo nella luna (A Horse in the Moon) Berecche e la guerra (Berecche and the War) and Il carnevale dei morti (The Carnival of the Dead). On opening any of these volumes, the reader soon discovers that death plays a role in about twothirds of the stories. Pirandello's obsession with death differs from the nightmare tales of Poe, Heine, and Maupassant as the Sicilian author focused on the empty rituals and the often pompous settings associated with death. While for a few of the characters in the novellas a tomb may provide a consoling sense of permanence, in many cases the grave fails to testify to enduring sentiments of attachment and comforting eternal rest. Death often occurs on an August afternoon as the result of a heat stroke when the African scirocco wind blows across the blazing fields of Sicily or the burning concrete streets of Rome. A recurring situation in the tales is that of the death watch where relatives and acquaintances gather at the home of a moribund person to wait out the final hours. Although the certainty of dying may offer release from the pain of living, the realization of immediate fatality can intensify the awareness of life.

Two tales that strikingly illustrate Pirandello's novelistic art are "Il Viaggio" ("The Journey," 1910) and "Felicità" ("Happiness," 1911). A critical analysis of each story will reveal the writer's investigation of a subterranean world of human anguish and expectation. Adriana Braggi, the protagonist of "Il Viaggio," begins to reawaken to her instinctual longing for life and love at the very time she receives a sentence of death from cancer of the lung. This tale reflects the influence of verismo on Pirandello as the author takes pains during the first two pages to detail the monotonous mode of life within the environment of a small town (called, pejoratively with the diminutive suffix, a "cittaduzza") in the interior of Sicily. The heroine appears to be an unconscious prisoner of time-honored custom in the narrow community where women lead a claustrophobic existence, usually leaving their homes only once a week to attend Sunday mass. In that rigid society women do not function as persons in their own right but merely as extensions of their husbands' being. The fashionable gowns and jewels, ordered from Palermo or Catania, that the women wear on their weekly expedition to church are intended to impress the townspeople with the prosperity of the husbands. Throughout the opening passages, the tense that predominates is the imperfect ("she used to go out," "she used to dress," "they used to see each other") to indicate the eternal monotony and unchanging character of village life. Upon describing the region's droughtridden conditions the author establishes a leitmotif for the story:

In all the houses, even in the few lordly ones, water was lacking; in the vast courtyards, as at the end of streets there were old cisterns at the mercy of the heavens; but even in winter it rarely rained . . .

This story's inner structure is based on the principle of water as the source of life and death, such as the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has traced in his text Water and Dreams. As the tale's title suggests, this is the story of a journey that the heroine will make to escape that land of drought and life-denying inflexible customs. Throughout Pirandello's novellas, the journey motif marks the attempt to discover a hitherto repressed reality.

Before her departure from the village Adriana Braggi lived in a state of unawareness, unquestionably obeying social demands for proper behavior. Her brief marriage of four years had been a silent and voluntary martyrdom of fidelity without love for a tyrannically jealous husband. What Pirandello emphasizes is that almost all the women in that empty provincial world suffer the identical fate as Adriana, except that they are never called to a journey of self-knowledge. Along with the aridity of their existence there is an atmosphere of oppressive silence that seems to annihilate the passing of time itself within the imprisoning walls of their homes "where time seemed to stagnate in a silence of death." After her husband's death, Adriana continues the routine of a provincial homemaker, staying on in the same house with her two sons, her mother, and her brother-in-law Cesare who according to village custom is the actual master of the home. It never occurs to her to deviate from time-honored custom or to rebel against a stultifying existence of being buried alive. Pirandello does not intervene directly into the tale; instead of commenting, he allows thoughts and events to take place as in a natural process. Indirect free style conveys how the death of Adriana's mother causes her to acknowledge the loss of her youth at age thirty-five. Premature old age, a drying up of vital energies, appears to be the inevitable destiny of those who accept provincial life.

Adriana's routine of living according to the village code is interrupted when she has to seek medical consulation and travels with her brother-in-law to Palermo. Away from the little town's suffocating environment, Adriana changes her apparel and her coiffure, as if she were starting a new life. The scene where she stands before a mirror and shows her new traveling outfit to her teenaged sons and astonished brother-in-law is an example of Pirandello's art of dramatic enactment: all four individuals take part in an experience of discovery, wherein Adriana realizes that she has not withered away in her silent widowhood. Although her new outfit is black for mourning, its elegance makes everyone aware of the youthful vitality previously submerged under the melancholy mask of provincial existence. Through brief snatches of dialogue Pirandello allows the scene to unfold for the reader as if it were a stage performance.

This tale of Adriana's journey is one of overcoming barriers. The first barrier is passed as Adriana leaves on her first train trip and watches the narrow houses of her arid village disappear from the window of her coach. She is leaving behind a life of unconscious captivity to village tradition. With the train trip all the solidity of life vanishes, a solidity which a writer like Verga saw symbolized by the domestic hearth but which Pirandello viewed as an illusion. After a medical specialist in the island's capital city pronounces a fatal diagnosis, Adriana refuses to succumb to the lethargy that had earlier oppressed her. As she stands by the Fountain of Hercules in Palermo's public garden, the widow undergoes a mystical experience on beholding the jets of water spraying over the statue of the demigod. The joy of a seemingly endless moment permits the woman to dominate the dread of death and for the first time in her life she opens her being to all the elusive magic of rich sensations: the brilliant colors of the capital city's streets at sunset, the exciting commotion of crowds of shoppers, and at the fountain a voluptuous feeling of eternity. At last, as life and death confront each other in her consciousness, Adriana ends her stagnation.

Rather than allow Adriana to return to the slow death of living in the village, Cesare takes her with him to Naples. Crossing the sea to reach the continent marks the passing of the second barrier, for the widow, with the primitive insular mentality of Sicilians, feels that the trip across the water must signify a turning point in her life. In Naples a mere touch of each other's arm as they promenade on the street one night suffices to reveal to Adriana and Cesare the affection which earlier they would never have acknowledged. Previously, the two were "masked" to each other and to the world of their home village, but now the certainty of death permits them to violate a traditional way of life which both had accepted without question. Adriana can cross the barriers of social taboos to discover the freedom of surrender to rapture. Transgression follows naturally upon reawakening.

With the collapse of moral strictures Adriana starts out on what will be both a journey of Eros and Thanatos for her—"a journey of love toward death." Pirandello deliberately brings his tale to a swift close to represent the heroine's frenetic journey through Rome, Florence, and Milan in a delirium of passion, where every moment becomes more precious than the one before since it might be the last the lovers will share. At Venice, the city most symbolic of decay and death, Adriana spends a day of velvet voluptuousness: the velvet of gondolas which, however, reminds her of the velvet lining of coffins. No longer able to elude the mirror image of death on her face, Adriana passes the ultimate barrier by poisoning herself. Her love for Cesare could never know the disenchantment that usually follows the rapture of passion in Pirandellian tales. From the imprisonment of life in a Sicilian village, Adriana has moved to the final confinement of death to end her journey of self-discovery. Water dominates throughout the tale: the arid village where rainfall seems like a holiday, mystical rebirth at the Palermo fountain, the liberation of the steamer trip, the dreamlike vision of Venice emerging proud and melancholy from its ever silent lagoons. The passionate journey to the source of life in water frees Pirandello's heroine from entrapment but ironically leads her to the surrender of death.

According to Pirandello, a sensual and sentimental relationship between a man and a woman can never end in enduring happiness. Instead, one of the few sources of lasting contentment, Pirandello suggests, is maternal love when it is permitted to blossom. The story "Felicità" illustrates how the satisfaction of the maternal instinct enables a woman to withstand social humiliation and poverty. This tale also demonstrates Pirandello's art of contrasting sadness with warmth and intimacy. It, too, is a story of barriers, in this instance, the barriers that the characters raise to isolate themselves from each other. The story opens in a zone of nearly explosive tension: at Palermo in the town palace of Duke Gaspare Grisanti, whose last hope for financial salvation has vanished after his only son deserted a wealthy wife to run off with an actress. An air of decay hangs over the gloomy rooms of the palace, made all the more oppressive by the stuffy odor of old furniture. Pirandello makes the tense atmosphere an almost tactile experience where a violent electric charge seems about to burst forth from every familiar object. All her childhood the duke's daughter Elisabetta lived in the palace's shadows, knowing her father did not love her because her lack of beauty would not attract a rich match to restore the family fortune. When Elisabetta asks for her father's consent to wed a tutor (a man from a far inferior social class), the duke agrees to the shameful marriage but banishes her forever from the palace. This tale then is concerned with the distances that people build between themselves. Pirandello portrays in spatial terms the spirit of exclusion that leads the duke to separate others (including his own child) from his aristocratic presence. Consequently, the son-in-law can enter the palace only by the servants' staircase to collect the meager checks granted to him in place of a dowry. Since the duke never intends to look at Elisabetta again, he arranges for his wife to meet her in a rented carriage. Here the author emphasizes how some individuals stubbornly attempt to manipulate reality, to the point of determining the space others can occupy and share with each other.

After Elisabetta's husband deserts her and flees Sicily to avoid prosecution for theft, the young woman rises above misery to radiant joy when she gives birth to a boy. She does not seek reconciliation with the duke, who continues to make his pompous daily appearance in public riding through the streets in a coach attended by footmen in perukes and livery. She has already established a humble "casetta" ("the little house"—the diminutive stresses both the impoverishment and the warm intimacy of the home), feeling no need to return to the palace's melancholy darkness. Mother and child can live at the outskirts of town, near a countryside of cheerful sunlight and fragrant flowers. The tale closes with Elisabetta's resolute dismissal of her mother's hope that the duke might relent and readmit his daughter and grandson to the palace. For in the little house a sense of sunny openness predominates, in contrast to the palace's dark constriction. As the story's title indicates, Elisabetta has created her own corner of happiness, such as Bachelard studies in his treatise The Poetics of Space. With a strength of will Pirandello thought unique to mothers, Elisabetta can bear exclusion from her aristocratic heritage because the truly vital identity she has discovered in maternity allows her to construct a zone of private contentment. Motherhood can then offer a release from the anguish of living.

Throughout his novellas Luigi Pirandello examined individual cases of the failure or success of his fictional characters to reach an accord with life. Adriana Braggi of "II Viaggio" discovers renewal and annihilation simultaneously, while Elisabetta Grisanti finds liberation in banishment. In his short fiction the writer explored situations of distress and alienation in a naturally condensed literary form.