The title sums up in three numbers what Vitangelo Moscarda discovers about himself. One is what he believed himself to be, the same for everyone. One hundred thousand are the Moscardas that each person who knows him builds in his own way. No one is what remains when he searches, within himself, for the owner of all of this, and finds no one.
The three words appear together for the first time in Chapter IV of Book I, when he comes upon, in a street mirror, a stranger he does not recognize: the one hundred thousand Moscardas he was, to others and to himself as well, all with the same ugly name, were inside a body that was one and none. The formula returns in Book IV, when he says he risked the madhouse and even had to risk his life to finally find the way to health, and the count reappears in Book V, when he lists eight people in a room where only two see him.
The title also says the book offers no single answer. Pirandello, in an interview given in Rio de Janeiro in December 1927, said that each person can be one, no one, or one hundred thousand, but that the choice is imperative, and that the tragedy lies in the law that obliges a man to be one, at the cost of all the lives he did not live. The novel dramatizes that choice and leaves it without conclusion, up to the last page, in which Moscarda chooses to have no name.