WAR (Quando si comprende)
by Luigi Pirandello, 1919

Although Luigi Pirandello is best known as a dramatist, he himself felt that his short stories, of which he wrote more than 200, would be his primary claim to artistic fame. Reflecting his mastery of drama, many of his stories, what Italians in the tradition of Boccaccio call novelle, focus on characters who reveal themselves primarily by dialogue. "War" ("Quando si comprende"), published in a 1919 collection and anthologized a number of times in college short story texts, is one of the best examples of this dramatic technique, for it focuses on a single situation limited in space and time in which a small number of characters reveal a hidden drama through speech. In their discussion of the story in the anthology Understanding Fiction, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren point out the lack of physical action in the story and emphasize its debate-centered structure.

The basic thematic tension in the story centers on the difference between a mother's inarticulate and irrational grief over the loss of her son and a father's elaborate argument justifying the death of his own son. What chiefly characterizes the woman is her physical bulk. She is a "shapeless bundle" who seems to have no control and must be hoisted into the train car by her husband. Almost dehumanized under her big coat, she twists and wriggles, at times "growling like a wild animal."

The story begins with the husband's excuse for the woman's state, for he feels that it is his duty to explain the situation to the five people in the second-class carriage. When he says that she is to be pitied since her son has been called to the front, the others begin to plead their own cases. One has a son who has already come back wounded twice, and another has two sons at the front. The argument begins when the husband says that his case is worse than the man with two sons, for he will have no one left if his only son is killed. Not to be outdone, the other man replies that, because all love is given to each child without discrimination, he is not suffering half for each son but double for each.

The debate becomes complicated further when a fat man calls all of this "nonsense." In response to one traveler's assertion that children do not belong to their parents but to the country, the man launches into an elaborate argument about how it is "natural" that children love their country, saying that children never belong to their parents even though their parents belong to them. He insists that, if their sons die when they are 20 years old, they die young and happy, without having experienced the "ugly sides of life, the boredom of it, the pettiness, the bitterness of disillusionment." He urges that everyone stop crying, thank God, and laugh as he does, for his son sent him a message saying that he was dying satisfied at having ended his life in the best way he could have wished.

Then, as if protesting too much, the fat man fingers his fawn coat and boasts that he does not even wear mourning. He ends his highly rational and idealistic speech with a shrill laugh, "which might well have been a sob." At this point the narrative focus shifts to the bulky and hitherto silent woman who has been listening with amazement at the fat man's speech, which "amazed and almost stunned her." She realizes intellectually that she has been wrong and the others right, for they are able to resign themselves stoically to the departure and even the death of their sons. The contrast between her own reasonless grief and the highly reasoned and idealized rhetoric of the fat man makes her feel that she has "stumbled into a world she had never dreamt of, a world so far unknown to her."

In the very midst of this rational acceptance, however, the woman abruptly returns to her unreasoning state, and suddenly, as if she had heard nothing of the fat man's speech, "almost as if waking from a dream," she turns to the man and asks, "Then … is your son really dead?" The word emphasized here is "really," for her "silly, incongruous question" undercuts the idealism of the man's speech with the unspeakable sorrow of the reality. The man looks at her as if he suddenly realizes that his son is dead, and, to the amazement of everyone, he breaks down in heartrending, uncontrollable sobs.

Although in its dependence on character and dialogue "War" seems like a one-act play, the climax of the story, the woman's simple question, is a typical example of a short story convention pioneered by Anton Chekhov. The question seems completely unprepared for, coming so soon after the woman's conscious acceptance of the fat man's rational and rhetorical speech. Her query about the reality of the situation undercuts everything that has been said before. As Chekhov made so subtly clear in his famous story "Misery" and Katherine Mansfield explored so memorably in her equally famous "The Fly," the ultimate mystery of loss can be confronted only in unspeakable and unreasonable grief.

—Charles E. May