An essay that compares the dramatic techniques of “Six Charac...

An essay that compares the dramatic techniques of “Six Characters in Search of an Author” (by Luigi Pirandello) and “Mother Courage” (by Bertolt Brecht).

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The Existential Absurdity in Brecht’s Mother Courage and
Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author

In this paper, the theme of existential absurdity will be discussed in the different techniques Brecht and Pirandello use to develop their plays Mother Courage and Six Characters in Search of an Author. Absurdity does not only mean “does not make sense.” To use Camus’s existential definition from the book The Myth of Sisyphus, “the absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” Human beings demand meaning, and it terrifies people to think that the universe does not give a damn about human suffering. Brecht and Pirandello explore the theme of the absurd in the following ways.
First, in Pirandello’s play the technique of the characters being aware that they are constructs in a fictional world is a clever technique to explore absurdity. They know their lives are made-up and only are meaningful in the mind of the playwright who wrote them into existence....