Embodiments of Life and Form in Uno, nessuno e centomila

Pirandello's novel 'Uno, nessuno e centomila' (1925) has a close relationship with the essay 'L’umorismo' (1908), where Pirandello condensed his aesthetics. The novel can indeed be considered an accurate narrative staging of the theories that underpin the essay: in fact, the author of 'L’umorismo' and the narrator of 'Uno, nessuno…' could well be the same person. In the transition from the essay to the novel, however, Pirandello adapted his speculations to his character’s personality. The article demonstrates this by considering some specific imagery embedded in the moments of understanding that punctuate the protagonist’s meditations: these interconnected elements, which include bodily features (hair, eyes and hands), colours (green, red and blue), and places (buildings vs. countryside), establish a cluster of figurative meaning around the core Pirandellian theme of the contrast between Life and Form. An old and inveterate critical tradition exists around these critical concepts, and this work aims at refreshing their use by showing their generative contribution to Pirandello's imagery. In the end, the novel's protagonist confirms himself as the champion of the view of life expressed in 'L’umorismo'. What makes him different, in this role, from a mere mouthpiece of Pirandello’s reflections, is the fact that he is made to voice these reflections from the point of view of his very specific personal history, so that they finally come to the reader permeated by his own concerns. Vitangelo’s traumatic discovery of his estranged body permanently marks all his successive thoughts: while he questions the world around him, his body colonises the outer space, bending the standardized Pirandellian tropes to his own preoccupations, and thus grounding his personal uncovering of eternal existential truths in a highly personal allegorization of reality.