SOURCE: "The Jests of Love and Death," in The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello's Narrative Writings, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978, pp. 108-22.

An American educator and critic, Radcliff-Umstead is the author and editor of numerous studies of Romance literature. In the following excerpt, he analyzes some of Pirandello's later short stories, to which the critic attributes a distinctly mythic quality.

Several of Pirandello's final novelle—written during the years of his most intense theatrical activity—reveal a desire to evade everyday reality in a higher plane of experience. What was examined in earlier tales like "Quand'ero matto" of 1901 as an escape into insanity became a mythic realm that the novelistic characters longed to enter. The dream world of these later tales recalls the higher reality that the contemporary school of French surrealists wished to explore. Like the poet Paul Eluard, the Italian author endeavored...