Word: chee
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Chee Chee proclaims himself at the outset a man disturbed almost to insanity by the protean nature of human personality...
...even remember that his visitor Squatriglia owes him a favor. But this conception of fragmented personality does not grip Chee Chee as the great and terrible existential dilemma that it may seem. We should become suspicious of this when we realize that here he opens his soul to a stranger, one who is bewildered by his philosophical speculation...
...Then Chee Chee turns the debt to a credit by asking an elaborate favor in return. Squatriglia is to extort from Chee Chee's lady friend, Nada, three I.O.U.s that Chee Chee had carelessly given her. Gradually, we see that Chee Chee's tormented introspection is but another role played before Squatriglia--and played for a calculated...
...Pirandello's great plays, we are forced, with his characters, to view role-playing with compassion: "The harder the struggle for life and the more one's weakness is felt, the greater becomes the need for mutual deception." Pirandello had been aware of this long before Chee-Chee--he wrote these words in 1908. But in Chee-Chee's hands, deception is stripped of any moral value, and becomes a cold and petty instrument of gain...
...might be an object of compassion. But he is significantly marred by the loss of his right eye, which is covered over with a bizarre skin graft. His blindness to the fact of role-playing is similarly a source of grotesque pity, certainly nothing with which we can identify. Chee-Chee calls him "indulgence personified," and deftly calculates Squatriglia's ineptitude at deception into his own plans to take in Nada...