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Yes, but haven't you perceived that it isn't possible to live in front of a mirror which not only freezes us with the image of ourselves, but throws our likeness back at us with a horrible grimace?

Mortified by the staging of the family's drama, the Son makes this protest to the Manager toward the end of Act III. It is particularly significant as Pirandello is known as the progenitor of the "mirror theater," a theater that concerns itself with the confrontation of the figures on the near and far side of the mirror relation. In the case of Six Characters, these figures are the Actor and Character. The Son charts two effects of the mirror-relation between Actor and Character. Both spring from the inability of the Actor as mirror to reflect the Character as it would see itself, its inability to return the Character's proper self-image.

In the second and more straightforward complaint, the image of the subject imitated in the other renders that likeness grotesque. In the first, vaguely reminiscent of the Medusa, the fascinating image of the Actor would freeze the Character it reflects. Put otherwise, the animation of the image requires the petrifaction of the body; the life of the persona or mask is the death of the person. The animation of the Character in the place of the Actor, an animation that takes place through imitation, is the Character's defacement. This meditation on the petrifying effect of the mirror, one that kills the Character by fixing him, perhaps reads in tension with the Father's comments on the Character's life and reality. According to the Father, both inhere precisely in the fixity of its image. Unlike transitory man, the mask is real and alive insofar as it cannot change. The Character's drama and role are fixed for all time. Perhaps the difference inheres in the process of alienation. The frozen image is fatal when reflected in the Actor because the places the self-image in the place of the other.

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