In “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” by Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello, protagonist sees stranger in mirror, symptom of multiple personality.

“…the moment Pirandello looks at the individual, he sees him in double, in triple, in multiple forms…there is no fixed personality. An Individual is only one of the indefinite personalities, which has for the moment the upper hand over all the others…” (1, pp. 40-41).

“Most readers of the general public who started to read Uno Nessuno e Centomila soon gave up in despair, because the book had all the appearance of being a pedantic treatise on psychology. The story of Vitangelo Moscarda is hidden away in a chaotic medley of psychological dialogues between various personalities of the author” (1, p. 111).

Moscarda’s Stranger in the Mirror

“…I happened to catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a mirror…I did not recognize myself at first…Was it really my own, that image glimpsed in a flash?…I still believed…that the stranger in question was a single individual…But my atrocious drama speedily grew more complicated, with the discovery of the hundred-thousand Moscardas that I was, not only to others, but even to myself…” (2, pp. 28-29).

“…a cursed voice from within kept telling me that he was there, too, the stranger, there in front of me, in the mirror” (2, p. 34).

“…my visage suddenly essayed in the mirror an unprepossessing smile. ‘Be serious, you imbecile!’ I shouted at it then. ‘There’s nothing to laugh about!’… ‘Moscarda,’ I murmured, after a long silence. It did not move, but stood gazing at me in astonishment. It might be that it had another name” (2, pp. 36-37).

“I glanced at myself in the clothespress mirror with an irresistible self-confidence; I even winked an eye by way of signifying to that Moscarda there that we two understood each other, all the while, marvelously well. And it is but the truth I am telling you, when I say that he winked back, by way of confirming that understanding.

“(You, I know, will inform me that this was due to the fact that the Moscarda in the mirror there was I; and by so doing, you will be proving to me yet one more time that you know nothing whatever about it. It was not I, I can assure you of that. This is evidenced by the fact that when, a moment later, before going out of the room, I turned my head a trifle to have a look at him in the mirror, he was already another person, even to me, with a satanic smile in his keen and brightly gleaming eyes. You would have been terrified by it, but not I; for the reason that I knew him; and I gave him a wave of the hand. He waved back at me in turn)” (2, pp. 206-207).

Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog to read past posts on mirrors in multiple personality.

1. Walter Starkie. Luigi Pirandello 1867-1936. Third Edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1926/1967.

2. Luigi Pirandello. One, None and a Hundred-Thousand [1926]. Translated from the Italian by Samuel Putnam. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1933.