Response to “War” by Luigi Pirandello

This short story affected me more dramatically than almost any other that I’ve read in the class so far. Strangely, I didn’t feel that emotionally connected to the piece in the initial stages of the story, though the content of sons going off to war and parents visiting them for the last time before they do so was obviously serious and heartbreaking. What I found so fascinating about this story’s affect on me was that it coincided directly with the characters’ emotions in the final moment when the wife asked her fellow passenger, “Then… is your son really dead?” (Pirandello 1262). Pirandello had built the tension of the passenger’s emotional breakdown throughout his speech to the other people on the train, highlighting the ways in which his physical appearance contradicted his words. The man states, “because my son, before dying, sent me a message saying that he was dying satisfied at having ended his life in the best way he could have wished. That is why, as you see, I do not even wear mourning…” (1262). Yet just after that Pirandello writes, “He shook his light fawn coat as if to show it; his livid upper lip over his missing teeth was trembling, his eyes were watery and motionless, and soon after he ended with a shrill laugh which might well have been a sob” illustrating that in fact he does grieve, and that all that grief lies just below the surface (1262). When the mother in the story asks him the ultimate question, the grief is triggered and, as Pirandello states, the moment of realization occurs. The man realizes that his son is dead and that no amount of philosophizing can reduce the pain of that. In the moment the man realizes this and crumbles, I felt the sharp pain as well. I was heartbroken when he was, and in a truly masterful feat of Pirandello’s, I was somehow blindsided by it.