One, no one, and one hundred thousand

Literary fiction · Absurdism · Dark comedy

Print length: 160 pagesMarsilio, 1992

Description

When Vitangelo Moscardo’s wife comments on his crooked nose, a casual observation unsettles his understanding of himself. He realizes that other people may perceive him differently from the way he perceives himself, and the thought becomes a consuming preoccupation. Vitangelo then tries to control how others understand his identity, confronting the gap between his private sense of self and the versions that exist in other minds. Luigi Pirandello’s novel follows this identity crisis as a single physical detail expands into a larger question: whether anyone can possess one stable identity when every observer may see a different person.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Essayistic · Experimental · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Absurdist · Cerebral · Philosophical · Unsettling

Structure

Episodic · Fragmented

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

IdentityIsolationKnowledge and truthObsession

About Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian dramatist, novelist, short-story writer, and poet whose reputation rests chiefly on his plays. His wide-ranging body of work includes novels, hundreds of stories, and roughly forty plays, some written in Sicilian. Pirandello repeatedly examines the instability of identity: the gap between a person’s sense of self and the competing versions constructed by others. In One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, a remark about a crooked nose opens an obsessive inquiry into that gap; The Late Mattia Pascal uses a mistaken death and an assumed name to test whether anyone can escape a socially fixed identity. His characteristic method places philosophical questions inside comic predicaments, allowing wit, absurdity, and mounting unease to work together. The resulting tragic farces helped anticipate the Theatre of the Absurd. Across genres, his work remains concerned with consciousness, self-knowledge, and the difficulty of sustaining a coherent identity among other people.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Marsilio
Language: English
ISBN: 9780941419741

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