Mattia Pascal grew up in a small Italian town not dissimilar to that of the author's upbringing. Pascal leads a somewhat feckless boyhood, allowing opportunities to slip away from him and living on the accumulated but dwindling resources of his family. As a young man he finds himself duped into poverty and an unhappy marriage made sadder by grief. He escapes on an adventure at Monte Carlo where he submits himself to Fortune which provides him with an extraordinary erasure of his old identity and the funds to maintain a new one. With the passage of a couple of years however he becomes horribly disillusioned with his situation and the isolation it brings. In a dramatic act he reassumes his old persona and returns to his home town, only to find himself written out of the script of his own life. In this novel Pirandello explores, as in his other works, themes of identity and reality, laced with plenty of wit and irony.
By : Luigi Pirandello (1867 - 1936), translated by Arthur Livingston (1883 - 1944)
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The protagonist, Mattia Pascal, finds that his promising youth has, through misfortune or misdeed, dissolved into a dreary dead-end job and a miserable marriage. His inheritance and the woman he loved are stolen from him by the same man, his eventual wife and mother-in-law badger him constantly, and his twin daughters, neglected by their mother, can provide him with joy only until an untimely death takes them. Death robs him even of his beloved mother.
To escape, he decides one day to sneak off to Monte Carlo, where he encounters an amazing string of luck, acquiring a small fortune. While reading a newspaper on his return home, he discovers, to his immense shock and delight, that his wife and mother-in-law declared an unknown corpse to be his own. Faced with this sudden opportunity to start afresh, he first wanders about Europe, and finally settles down in Rome with an assumed identity. His character develops in unexpected, even admirable, ways. Yet one admirable act brings the protagonist a crisis, followed by additional crises that lead him to conclude that continuing with his plans will entail only misery for those he loves, precisely because his entire life, including the precious liberty he thought he had gained from his past, is now a lie. He ultimately decides to fake his own death and return to his original life. But even that proves difficult; his family and town have long since adjusted to his "death," and his own adjustment of character prompts him to have mercy on his now remarried wife. So the twice-dead Late Mattia Pascal reduces himself to a figure outside the mainstream of society, a walk-on part in his own life.
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