The best known of the novels, _Il fu Mattia Pascal_, first published some twenty years ago when Pirandello was still a comparatively young man, is better written than the short stories. Or is it? Perhaps it has, rather, a youthful brio that they lack, a kind of gusto that rushes one along through the dry heaps of words. And also it is told in the first person; which gives it an advantage. It is only in this gusto that the book is young, however. Its spirit is not young at all, but cool, rather hard and sophisticated--not in a callow way, but maturely. I like the moralizing in the novel as much as I dislike it in most of the short stories, partly because here it is a natural expression of the characters who indulge in it, partly because it is in itself often very suggestive; indeed, I am inclined to think that the moralizing is the best of the book. On the other hand, the most interesting thing is the plot, because in it one discerns the as yet incoherent beginnings of an idea that, developed, has come to haunt Pirandello--the idea of the reality of illusion, and thus of the manifold nature of personality. In the plays one almost never gets away from some variation on this theme. _Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore_ is hardly less frankly concerned with it than _Vestire gli ignudi_ or _Come prima, meglio di prima_. But in the novel there is only the foreshadowing of the idea; it is certainly not made clear to the reader, and was almost equally certainly not yet clear to Pirandello himself; and the result is confusion. Mattia Pascal is believed by his family and friends to have committed suicide. A body supposed to be his is discovered and formally buried. Taking advantage of this, he gives himself a new name, Adriano Meis, invents a past for himself, and sets out to live anew, free. But he finds that he cannot endure the emptiness of liberty any more than he could endure the chains in which he struggled when alive. He is sucked back into life, and eventually falls in love with a girl, Adriana, but cannot marry her because the man as whom she knows him is a fictitious man, with no papers, no _stato civile_, nothing. He--or, at least, the man he was before he died--has a wife already. So he ‘commits suicide’ a second time, becomes once more Mattia Pascal, and returns to his home--to find his wife long since married to his best friend, and with a baby. As far as I can make it out, what he then does is to live in a state half-way between life and death. He leaves his wife to his friend, and becomes--calls himself--‘the late Mattia Pascal.’