Word: chee
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...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...
...lack of any feeling behind all of these deceptions reflects the hollowness of Chee-Chee. In the Pirandellian wilderness of mirrors and puppets, emotion at least must be real. Artistically, it is emotion which must charge Pirandello's otherwise intellectualized prose with dramatic truth, as he well knew: the playwright needs to find the word which will be the action itself spoken, the living word that moves, the immediate expression, having the same nature as the act itself...