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Main themes -
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Setting -
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Characters -
Drawings created by Alice Corsi
Main themes
The big war showed itself in all its darkness even to
the ones who had previously sung the praises in favour
of it. Let’s think of Giuseppe Ungaretti: in 1915 he was
a very young boy, he left as a voluntary soldier to
discover that the war was very different with respect to
what had been showed him by the nationalistic
propaganda, and he wrote an important work of that
dramatic experience. Pirandello lived this experience in
first person, because his son had left as a voluntary
soldier, and he was imprisoned in an Austrian
concentration camp. In the short story we have
translated, “When you realize”, the theme of the tragedy
and meaninglessness of the war, bursts out in a
particular situation: a discussion in a railway wagon
between some travellers. They exchange many different
observations about the pain and the fear for their sons
in war. In this discussion the main character is a
father that tries to remove the pain for his son’s death
with the idea that the sons don’t belong to their
parents, but they are masters of their life. He says
that we need to accept their choices: his son is dead
for an ideal, for our Country because he wanted it. But
the astonished and desperate attitude of a mother,
careless of the justification that the man has produced,
brings back the idea of death to his real essence.
In this short story there’s another important theme: the
family. The family is seen as a strong tie that joins
parents and children together. This concept becomes
object of discussion between the travellers. They speak
about their sons at war: Is it worse to have one or two
sons at the battlefront? Unlike Giuseppe Mazzini,
Pirandello doesn’t think that the family is the central
nucleus of our society, that is to say No family, no
life! The family isn’t considered from an idyllic point
of view; it is not showed as a place where only love and
good feelings live, but in Pirandello’s works all the
disgraces and very negative events occur just inside the
family.
by Luca Forte and
Marco Roberti
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Setting
After
waiting for the dawn at the station of Fabriano the
gentlteman and the lady go up on a "little ramshackle
slow train" and the entire novella develops in a
carriage of this train . In the interior of this
carriage it is represented a cross-section of daily life
in time of war. The squalid and depressing atmosphere
shows all the travellers the awkward lady like an
nightmare. This carriage transports various persons,
each one with a divergent vision of life and family.
They are a lot but, just for the narrow space in which
they are forced to be, these persons exchange personal
opinions and thoughts that perhaps they would not have
expressed in other circumstances or in a different
place. The carriage becomes a small microcosm that
represents the truth that crumbles in the many and
various points of view of who is still alive.
by Ramona Bianchi
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Characters
In the
first part of this story a particular married couple is
put in evidence:
the lady is fat and ungainly, defeated
by hurt, wrapped in a mantle, dragged in a railcar with
efforts by a feeble and short husband that almost
disappears near his wife. The woman sinks in a nook of
the seat, she covers up with the collar of her mantle
while the man tries to win the embarrassment by
justifying the attitude of his wife who is distressed
for the departure of her only son for the battle front.
The lady snorts for the chats of her husband, maybe
because she thinks that they are not interesting at all
for the other people in the train.
The married couple
shows an imbalance both for their two different figures
and for their different attitudes. In fact it is
evident that the two characters of this novella react in
two different ways to the departure of their son: she is
overwhelmed, but her husband does not understand her
condition and he tries to justify to the others the
psychological condition of his wife.
Around to the two an argument is opened in which three
companions of travel take part. The first two
interlocutors are not characterized and physically
demonstrate an attitude of intolerance towards the
couple because also their sons and nephews are at war
and the pain for an only child is as much as for more
than one.
 But
another character comes forward: he dominates the whole
second part of the story. First of all the narrator
introduces him from physical point of view by defining
him as fat and blood. This traveller takes part in the
argument which is focused on the idea that sons have
their own life, make their own choices and if they die
for their choices- their love towards their native in
this case – their parents have to accept their choices,
because they have died for what they believed in.
This
attitude apparently sure and balanced will lead to a
fast change into desperation when the mother, after
waking for a moment from the state of depression in
which she was, expresses all her astonishment towards
what the man had said by simply asking: “Is your son
really dead?”. Her reaction puts in crisis all the
mechanism of justification that the father had created
around the loss of his son and makes the raw truth
appear in the stunned eyes of her companion of travel.
It is him that the title of the story refers to, because
in the end, after the woman’s question, he realizes his
son is really dead. He embodies the typical
Pirandellian character who, in order to protect himself
from the blows the absurdity of life inflicts, finds a
shelter in an abstraction that does not have nothing to
do with the true life.
by Marco Roberti, Luca
Forte, Ramona Bianchi and Alice Corsi
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