War Analysis
by Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello uses a well-established literary device to tell his story: He contrives a restricted setting for his characters and lets them share their thoughts with one another. Such constraint—Pirandello even honors the three classical unities of time, place, and action—more dramatically reveals a world in which all progress and hope of progress has ceased. This atmosphere is as dull, oppressive, and intrusive as yesterday’s lifeless beer. Pirandello is trying to represent human experience as realistically and banally as possible and could hardly be considered a symbolist; nevertheless, the imagery is there. His characters sit in an old-fashioned train in a small railway station in a small Italian province and wait to be taken to an even more remote and backward part of their country. They wait for something to happen with the dread that it might. They wait with the same spirit of resignation in which they struggle to accept and minimize the ultimate loss of their sons.

Pirandello lets the characters speak for themselves. He offers the barest of description, saving himself the trouble by relying on the reader’s own knowledge of his locale. In thus downplaying the surroundings, Pirandello is able to intensify the characters’ relationships to one another. This intensification is necessary because his characters are so essentially colorless, with features made deliberately unpleasant. Consider how Pirandello describes their eyes: One has “bloodshot eyes of the palest grey”; another has “eyes small and bright and looking shy and uneasy”; still another has “his eyes [that] were watery and motionless”; and yet another has “bulging, horrible watery light grey eyes”: These are people in decay.

Pirandello’s style is lean, remarkably lacking in metaphors and imagery. His descriptions are sparse and gray. He seems to be repetitive and...