The Jar by Luigi Pirandello
Quick answer: The Jar by Luigi Pirandello: complete summary with the ending, Don Lollò and Zi' Dima, themes of property and pride, and the comic craft worth stealing.
A landowner buys an enormous olive-oil jar, the jar cracks, and the man hired to mend it ends up sealed inside it, at which point the question becomes legal: who owes whom? Luigi Pirandello's The Jar, published in 1909 and set among the olive groves of his native Sicily, is one of the funniest short stories in the European canon, and like most Pirandello it is a philosophical trap wearing a clown's nose.
Pirandello would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1934 and to upend modern theatre with Six Characters in Search of an Author; he also turned this story into a popular one-act play in 1917. Students meet The Jar as the classic comic study of property and pride. Writers should study how a single absurd premise is escalated with perfectly straight logic.
The story in brief, ending included
Don Lollò Zirafa, a Sicilian landowner so quarrelsome that he keeps a lawyer permanently busy, buys a magnificent new jar for the coming olive harvest, a jar tall as a man, paid for in hard cash. Days later it is found cracked clean across, and Don Lollò, after raging at the world, summons Zi' Dima Licasi, a bent old mender famous for a miraculous cement of his own invention. Zi' Dima wants to use cement alone; Don Lollò, distrustful, insists on rivets as well. Mortally offended but outvoted, the old man climbs inside the jar to stitch it up, and does the job beautifully. Then he discovers that the jar, mended around him, has a mouth too narrow for his shoulders. He is sealed in.
The lawyer, consulted amid Don Lollò's fury, laughs until he aches and then lays out the dilemma: keep the man inside and you are guilty of imprisonment; break the jar to free him and you bear the loss, especially since Zi' Dima maintains the fault lies with the rivets he never wanted. Zi' Dima, comfortable in his new home, refuses to pay the jar's value, declaring he would rather stay, and settles in with tobacco and the money for his repair. That night the farm labourers feast and dance around the inhabited jar under the moon. Don Lollò, woken by the racket and beside himself, charges down and shoves the jar, which rolls down the slope and shatters against an olive tree. Zi' Dima crawls out unhurt, victorious, carried off in triumph by the labourers.
The characters
Two stubborn men and a jar between them: the geometry of the whole comedy.
Themes: property, pride and the trap of being right
The exam-ready readings start with property: Don Lollò owns everything in sight, yet ownership gives him no power over events, only more surface area for grievance. Class runs underneath, the landowner against the day labourer, and the peasants' midnight dance around the jar is a small carnival of the poor at the master's expense. Pride drives both men: Don Lollò's insistence on rivets causes the disaster, and Zi' Dima's wounded craftsman's honour makes him choose the jar over a compromise.
The sharper point is very Pirandello: each man is trapped by his own logic, not by his enemy. Don Lollò cannot free his prisoner without destroying his property, because he has defined life entirely in terms of property; Zi' Dima cannot leave the jar without admitting his cement needed rivets. The jar is only the visible container. Both men were sealed inside their positions long before the cement dried, and the comedy is watching them furnish their prisons.
The craft: escalation played straight
The engine here is one absurd event treated with total procedural seriousness. Once Zi' Dima is inside the jar, Pirandello never nudges the reader or milks the image; instead he brings on a lawyer and lets the situation be analysed as a genuine legal problem. The comedy multiplies because everyone behaves consistently with who they are. The lesson for writers: after the impossible premise, allow no character to act out of character; rigour is what makes absurdity pay.
The ending is worth diagramming. Pirandello refuses both tidy solutions, payment or surrender, and resolves the deadlock through temperament: Don Lollò's rage does what no negotiation could, and in destroying his own property he frees his adversary and hands him the win. The resolution comes from inside a character's established flaw, which is why it satisfies. Writory's Short Story Contest scores storytelling and character in separate columns, and a plot that resolves through a flaw like this fills both at once.
From Sicily to the stage
The story belongs to Pirandello's Novelle per un anno, the vast cycle of tales he wrote across his career, and it distils his Sicilian childhood among sulphur merchants and landowners into forty-odd olive trees and one ceramic disaster. In 1917 he reworked it as the one-act comedy La giara, still a staple of Italian theatre, and it later became a celebrated ballet with music by Alfredo Casella, as well as an episode in the Taviani brothers' film Kaos. Few stories prove so neatly that farce and philosophy are the same machine running at different speeds.
What poets can take from this
- In an essay, name the double trap: the physical jar around Zi' Dima and the logical jar around Don Lollò.
- Use the rivets as your key detail: Don Lollò's distrust directly causes the imprisonment, a clean cause-and-effect point.
- Read the moonlight dance as carnival: the labourers briefly invert the master-servant order, and the master ends it by self-defeat.
- Compare the prose tale (1909) with the play La giara (1917) if you need a context paragraph.
- As a writer, after your absurd premise, escalate through professional seriousness, a lawyer, a form, a procedure, rather than more absurdity.
- Resolve your comic deadlock through an established character flaw, never through coincidence.
Try it yourself
Write a comic story in which a repair, upgrade or improvement traps someone inside the very thing being fixed, then bring in an expert who explains why every exit is legally or socially impossible, and let a character's temper finally cut the knot.
Questions
What happens at the end of The Jar?
Enraged by the labourers feasting and dancing around the inhabited jar at night, Don Lollò shoves it; it rolls downhill and smashes against an olive tree. Zi' Dima emerges unhurt and triumphant, having paid nothing, and the labourers carry him off in celebration.
What is the theme of The Jar by Pirandello?
Property and pride as self-made prisons. Don Lollò's obsession with ownership and Zi' Dima's craftsman's honour lock both men into positions neither can abandon, so the jar becomes a comic image of how people trap themselves inside their own logic.
Why does Zi' Dima refuse to be freed from the jar?
Freeing him requires breaking the jar, and Don Lollò demands he pay for it first. Since Zi' Dima blames the compulsory rivets for his imprisonment, paying would mean admitting his cement was not enough, so he chooses to stay, comfortable and in the right.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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