Ragusa is an Italian-born American critic and educator with a special interest in Italian literature. In the following excerpt, she offers a thematic and structural analysis of Six Characters in Search of an Author.

The following is a translation of Pirandello's preface to Six Characters.

An affinity has often been seen between the theater of Pirandello and the surrealist mode because both adhere to such notions as the "absurd," the unconventional, the iconoclastic, and the shocking to stir the receivers of the created work. Let us examine these elements from the angle of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author as well as of the surrealists' position, to determine the nature of affiliations and of differences.