One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand is about identity: about what is left of a man when the images others form of him are taken away. The narrator, Vitangelo Moscarda, discovers that he is one to himself, one hundred thousand to those who know him, and perhaps no one, and spends the novel trying to get out of this impasse.
The subject unfolds into the six themes the book works on most. Identity appears as something the gaze of others builds, from the nose to the father's profession. Appearance and reality, in the fact that each person lives inside the other's illusion, and that reality is not given but made. Madness, as the name others give to whoever refuses the image that suits him. Loneliness, as the discovery that consciousness is the others within us. Money, in the inheritance of a bank that the city calls usury. And God, the name Moscarda gives to the point where he feels wounded.
Pirandello does not treat the subject in the abstract. The book is a case told in the first person, to a reader addressed as "gentlemen," with scenes and experiments: the eviction of a man, a shot, a green blanket. The question that remains is what it costs to try to be one, and what is left of someone who gives up trying.
All of this springs from a short sentence: that Moscarda's nose, which he had never seen lean, leaned to the right.