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Realistic conventions have been playing an important role in
play-writing up to the Second World War. Theater seems the
mechanism by which the playwright relfects reality. For Luigi
Pirandello, reality is like an ever-changing living form;
language just creates illusions rather than reality for the
empty abstraction of the words. Pirandello's theater trilogy
best accounts for his obsession with language. Hence, this
thesis is to investigate, from Derridean perspective,the
disintegration of the self in the act of creation in Luigi
Pirandello's theater trilogy. In Chapter One, I introduce
Pirandello's life,his theatric aesthetics, and deconstruction
related to Pirandello's main ideas. Chapter Two is a study of
<Six Characters in Search of an Author>.I examine the
reversibility of the "violent hierarchy" in the theater and the
hybrid nature of the text. In this play the self is distrupted
in the differance of language. Chapter Three centers on <Each
in His Own Way> . By inves- tigating "the dangerous supplement"
of speech, I want to show the futility of searching for the
absolute. I observe that in the uncertainty of words the
individual has become the location of a sign where many selves
come and go. Chapter Four is an analysis of <Tonight We
Improvise>. Now language is used not for communication but for
power struggle. The players are torn between the absolute
authority of the author and the freedom of creation. This
thesis concludes that Pirandello's theater trilogy presents the
chaos of language; it is a Babellian allegory of language in
which the concept of the self is deconstructed.
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