The interplay of illusion and reality as the subject matter of literature has, in the modern context, often been considered the particular invention and virtually exclusive province of Pirandello but, as one critic has aptly said in this connection, “it is so far from being a peculiarly Pirandellian theme as to be perhaps the main theme of literature in general.” In the case of Spanish literature in particular the reversible relationship of the real and the imaginative, of art and life, has been responsible for the Pirandellian type of inversion centuries before the advent of the Italian playwright.
