This study will compare and contrast the presentation of the narratives in two plays, Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. The basis for the comparison will be the traditional story-telling approach of Ibsen and the unconventional narrative (or anti-narrative) of Pirandello.
Ibsen is concerned with the story, with the traditional beginning, middle and end of the story, and with the basic elements which go into a story. He does not seek to upset or radicalize the audience's notions of what a story should be or is. He presents the characters as beings with discernible and fairly continuous personalities. Though Ibsen's writing is sophisticated and artful, the audience is able to follow the narrative and the actions and relationships of the characters as in any traditional story. It is a world and a reality, in other words, that is familiar to the audience, and they are able to lose themselves in the storytelling because of that basic familiarity.
Pirandello, on the other hand, is not interested in the conventional story, conventional narrative, or conventional characterization. In fact, he seeks not to tell a story, but to radically disturb the notions of the audience or readers as to what a story is or is supposed to be. Accordingly, his characters are not really characters at all, but are rather pieces of the imagination of the author who has discarded them into the chaotic "play" in which they find themselves rehearsing another play by the same author, Pirandello himself.
Both authors in their narrative approaches can be said to be exploring the nature of human reality. However, the ways in which they interpret that "reality" reveal a great difference in their approach to the function of art.
Ibsen accepts the conventions of storytelling and the reality that underlies those conventions. In other words, "reality" in his play resembles, in a highly dramatized form, t...