The narrator views his life as being nonsensical and thus, from this, he loses his agency. An example of the resulting insignificance is how the narrator in the short story “The Clown Puppet” views his life as being “one episode after another of conspicuous nonsense, each completely outrageous in its nonsensicality” (Ligotti 53). From this lack, the narrators’ lives are rendered void of purpose and significance therefore, they cannot identify themselves as true individuals. It is from the narrators’ lack of given physical descriptions, names, gender, personal details, and lack of stable and sustainable employment that results in an overall lack of identity. A distinguishing and repetitive trait of the collection’s many narrators is their lack of identity. The characters’ lack of agency is shown in their unformed identities and through the Gothic concept of abjection.

Ligotti develops the grotesquery of predestination through the exploration of the collection’s characters’ lack of agency, the characters’ perspectives, and through the Gothic concept of the Freudian Uncanny. This theme is a pivotal influence in the short stories contained in the collection as the characters’ fates are predestined in their absence of free will and self-identity.

The title of Thomas Ligotti’s collection of short stories, Teatro Grottesco, can be translated from the Italian to mean ‘Grotesque Theater.’ The Italian definition relates to the Grotesque distortion of the American Gothic theme-that fate is predestined and controlled by some higher power.

Ligotti teatro grottesco