The "characters" persistently claim to be "real" until the very end, despite the audience "knowing" they are actors. This tension between perceived reality and actual performance is heightened by the actors' reactions during key moments of the play. In Act I, for instance, the Stepdaughter narrates the "story" of these "characters" when the Mother faints out of shame. The actors react by asking, "Is it real? Has she really fainted?" The audience might be tempted to dismiss this easily, "knowing" that everyone on stage is just acting. However, this question resurfaces even more dramatically at the play's conclusion. A realistic-sounding gunshot is heard, and the Mother rushes towards her child with a genuine cry of terror. The actors gather around "in general confusion," and the Producer steps into the midst of the group, echoing the audience's own doubts by asking, "Is he really wounded? Really wounded?" An actress then declares, "He's dead! The poor boy! He's dead! What a terrible thing!" to which an actor retorts, "What do you mean, dead! It's all make-believe. It's a sham! He's not dead. Don't you believe it!" A chorus of actor voices expresses the unresolved duality that Pirandello leaves hanging: "Make-believe? It's real! Real! He's dead!" says one, while another counters, "No, he isn't. He's pretending! It's all make-believe." The Father reassures everyone that "it's reality!" and the Producer, exasperated, opts out of deciding: "Make-believe?! Reality?! Oh, go to hell the lot of you! Lights! Lights! Lights!"

Permanence and the Concept of Self
Pirandello was convinced that in real life, many things are accepted as real when they should not be. He only had to recall his insane wife's decades of baseless accusations to understand that what the mind perceives as true is often flagrantly false. However, if illusions are repeated often enough, believed long enough, and if enough people accept them as real, these illusions can develop a compelling reality within the culture at large. A prime example of this is the widely held belief in the permanence of personal identity.

Many people believe that their personality remains relatively stable and that they remain essentially the same throughout their lives. However, Pirandello and the Father challenge this notion in Act III when the Father asks the Producer, "do you really know who you are?" The Producer stammers, "what? Who I am? I am me!" Yet, the Father shakes this confidence by highlighting that the Producer does not view himself the same way on different days. Everyone can recall beliefs they no longer hold, illusions they once fervently believed in, or perceptions that have changed over time. The Father makes the Producer acknowledge that "all these realities of today are going to seem tomorrow as if they had been an illusion," and "perhaps you ought to distrust your own sense of reality." Cornered by these insights, the Producer exclaims, "but everybody knows that _ [his reality] can change, don't they? It's always changing! Just like everybody else's!"

The issue of a consistent personal identity is vital to the Father because the Stepdaughter is portraying him as a lecherous and even incestuous man. The Father asserts, "we all, you see, think of ourselves as one single person: but it's not true: each of us is several different people, and all these people live inside us. With one person we seem like this and with another we seem very different. But we always have the illusion of being the same person for everybody and of always being the same person in everything we do. But it's not true! It's not true!" The psychological and physiological needs that drove the Father to the brothel represent a part of him he does not value; yet, others, like his stepdaughter and former wife, choose to define him by this moment of weakness. "We realise then," he says, "that every part of us was not involved in what we'd been doing and that it would be a dreadful injustice of other people to judge us only by this one action as we dangle there, hanging in chains, fixed for all eternity, as if the whole of one's personality were summed up in that single, interrupted action." The Father regrets the incident at Madame Pace's brothel but insists that a human being cannot be defined by a consistent personal identity. The truth is that a person changes so significantly from day to day that they cannot be considered the same individual at any point in their life. A person might change hour by hour, potentially becoming 100,000 essentially different people before their life ends.