Being Written, Being Watched

Being Written, Being Watched: Sophocles's Oedipus Rex and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author explores how drama presents human beings as both shaped by a script and exposed to the gaze of others. Through a comparative reading of Oedipus Rex and Six Characters in Search of an Author, the book examines fate, authorship, identity, prophecy, performance, and spectatorship. In Sophocles, Oedipus becomes trapped within a destiny already written by prophecy. In Pirandello, unfinished characters struggle against the author who created them. Bringing classical tragedy and modern meta-theatre together, the study argues that both plays reveal the human self as unstable, watched, interpreted, and never fully in control of its own story.