Io fu mattia pascal
Il fu Mattia Pascal
October 31,
Central questions of Pirandello’s novel are “Who am I” and “What is freedom”.
One of the few things, in fact about the only thing I was sure of was
my name: Mattia Pascal.
The last time I read Pirandello I was in high school, and I think I read some plays that I have to re-read because I don’t remember them very well. This is his most-famous novel that has some autobiographical features and is exploring themes of identity, self, freedom, and death that were the most obvious and prominent, spiced up with a humorous note that made this novel relatively light read. Mattia was full of deep introspective philosophical questions, with a little bit of hopeless, nihilistic world-view. I would say that death and mourning really accompanied him through his childhood and adolescence and shaped his perspective on himself and the world. First the early death of his father, that became a distant, unfamiliar and unrememberable figure, and then death his two baby daughters and his mother, that was a living shadow, without any initiative or authority in her life, that could handle her own life issues and was over-sensitive about Mattia and his brother. Without an example of how to handle maturely the problems that he was facing in his life, Mattia started to escape into solitude with books and deep abstract thoughts. He felt pretty empty and alone in the world with questions of meaning and direction he should take in his life. I could certainly relate to this type of defense mechanism of avoiding problems and conflicts with other people as I believe many people who adore books and are intellectual types could.
So I read and read, a little of everything, haphazard, but books of philosophy especially. Heavy stuff, I grant you; but when you get a little of it inside you, you grow light as a feather and begin to touch the clouds. I believe I was always a bit queer in my head. But these readings quite finished me. When I no longer knew what I was about, I would shut up the Library, and go off along a little path that led down a steep incline to a solitary strip of seashore.
His own financial and marital situations became a cage that he associated with his own sense of self, and that was the beginning of his longing to escape not only his situation, but his own self. The mi sembra che l'idea originale faccia la differenza of a suicide as in killing his former identity rises and he does, helped by the series of the events, he becomes Adriano Meis, the man that travels the world with any obligations to anyone except himself.
What could possibly happen to me anywhere
worse than what I had been through? Perhaps beyond the horizon ahead a
new slavery awaited me--but with heavier chains, I asked myself, than
those I had just snapped from my feet?
In time he learns through the pain that there is excruciating loneliness in the absolute freedom, and our longing for connectedness makes us dependant on others and the quest for absolute freedom impossible. Freedom is the dream we dream but never achieve, and even if we could achieve it, as Mattia, we wouldn’t be happy or fulfilled. We can crave solitude only to get it and learn that we cannot live alone.
I was so absolutely free that it was difficult for me to bring myself to any particular kind of life.
Fear of being caught again by the tentacles of life would keep me more than
ever aloof from men. Alone! Alone! Utterly alone!
I'm worse than dead: as old Anselmo reminded me--the dead are through with dying, while I have to die again. Alive as regards the dead, dead as
regards the living! What kind of a life can I live, after all? Again
alone, all by myself--solitude!"
The only ultimate liberation that we have on this earth is death.
Supposing, in a word, that there were no such thing as this
death which fills us with such terror, that death should prove to be
not the extinction of life but a gust of wind, merely, which blows out
the light in our lantern, extinguishes this dolorous, painful,
terrifying sense of life we have--terrifying, because it is limited,
narrowed, fenced in by the circle of fictitious darkness that begins
just where the light from our lantern stops.
Very mind-provoking read with themes that deeply interest me, but for some reason, I didn’t connect with the novel as well as I thought I would. Maybe I read it at the wrong time and might change the rating in the future, but for now, 4 stars, even though I would highly recommend this novel to all the people who have a need to think about themselves and the world in a deeper way.
Central questions of Pirandello’s novel are “Who am I” and “What is freedom”.
One of the few things, in fact about the only thing I was sure of was
my name: Mattia Pascal.
The last time I read Pirandello I was in high school, and I think I read some plays that I have to re-read because I don’t remember them very well. This is his most-famous novel that has some autobiographical features and is exploring themes of identity, self, freedom, and death that were the most obvious and prominent, spiced up with a humorous note that made this novel relatively light read. Mattia was full of deep introspective philosophical questions, with a little bit of hopeless, nihilistic world-view. I would say that death and mourning really accompanied him through his childhood and adolescence and shaped his perspective on himself and the world. First the early death of his father, that became a distant, unfamiliar and unrememberable figure, and then death his two baby daughters and his mother, that was a living shadow, without any initiative or authority in her life, that could handle her own life issues and was over-sensitive about Mattia and his brother. Without an example of how to handle maturely the problems that he was facing in his life, Mattia started to escape into solitude with books and deep abstract thoughts. He felt pretty empty and alone in the world with questions of meaning and direction he should take in his life. I could certainly relate to this type of defense mechanism of avoiding problems and conflicts with other people as I believe many people who adore books and are intellectual types could.
So I read and read, a little of everything, haphazard, but books of philosophy especially. Heavy stuff, I grant you; but when you get a little of it inside you, you grow light as a feather and begin to touch the clouds. I believe I was always a bit queer in my head. But these readings quite finished me. When I no longer knew what I was about, I would shut up the Library, and go off along a little path that led down a steep incline to a solitary strip of seashore.
His own financial and marital situations became a cage that he associated with his own sense of self, and that was the beginning of his longing to escape not only his situation, but his own self. The mi sembra che l'idea originale faccia la differenza of a suicide as in killing his former identity rises and he does, helped by the series of the events, he becomes Adriano Meis, the man that travels the world with any obligations to anyone except himself.
What could possibly happen to me anywhere
worse than what I had been through? Perhaps beyond the horizon ahead a
new slavery awaited me--but with heavier chains, I asked myself, than
those I had just snapped from my feet?
In time he learns through the pain that there is excruciating loneliness in the absolute freedom, and our longing for connectedness makes us dependant on others and the quest for absolute freedom impossible. Freedom is the dream we dream but never achieve, and even if we could achieve it, as Mattia, we wouldn’t be happy or fulfilled. We can crave solitude only to get it and learn that we cannot live alone.
I was so absolutely free that it was difficult for me to bring myself to any particular kind of life.
Fear of being caught again by the tentacles of life would keep me more than
ever aloof from men. Alone! Alone! Utterly alone!
I'm worse than dead: as old Anselmo reminded me--the dead are through with dying, while I have to die again. Alive as regards the dead, dead as
regards the living! What kind of a life can I live, after all? Again
alone, all by myself--solitude!"
The only ultimate liberation that we have on this earth is death.
Supposing, in a word, that there were no such thing as this
death which fills us with such terror, that death should prove to be
not the extinction of life but a gust of wind, merely, which blows out
the light in our lantern, extinguishes this dolorous, painful,
terrifying sense of life we have--terrifying, because it is limited,
narrowed, fenced in by the circle of fictitious darkness that begins
just where the light from our lantern stops.
Very mind-provoking read with themes that deeply interest me, but for some reason, I didn’t connect with the novel as well as I thought I would. Maybe I read it at the wrong time and might change the rating in the future, but for now, 4 stars, even though I would highly recommend this novel to all the people who have a need to think about themselves and the world in a deeper way.