The question of being narrows dramatically from Beckett to Thomas Bernhard, in what amounts to a defining movement of 20th century European literature. Beckett's trilogy ends, so to speak, as a vaudeville act overshadowed by the interminable prevarication of nihilism. We go on while not knowing how and feeling we cannot. For Bernhard, however, the question of our going on being leaves no room for Beckett's vagrants and the tragicomedy of their straddling, crooked trajectories. In Bernhard's masterpiece, Korrektur, Roithamer digresses ad nauseam but does not quibble: “The question has always been only, how can I go on at all, not in what respect and in what condition” (1975, p. 130). The work of the negative does not plumb the depths of absence and loss in Bernhard, but rather, closes around