The Entangled Self: Style and The Unconscious in the work of Thomas Bernhard

His physical life diseased and tortured, his emotional life scarred and battered, Thomas Bernhard embodied alienated man. Fatherless, stateless, and godless, he fashioned characters in his own existential image: cantankerous, cynical, and misanthropic. Despite such a myopic angle of vision, despite his self-pitying groaning, Bernhard frustrates the grudging reader from slamming shut whatever novel he or she is reading, goading him or her to continue scrutinizing the single paragraph that ends some hundreds of pages later in the same alternating tone of arrogance and despair that marks its opening sentences. Why one tolerates and why one is ultimately transfixed by such an accusing voice is one of the central questions raised by the fiction of Thomas Bernhard.

In his first novel, Gargoyles (1986b), Bernhard's fascinating Prince Saurau, the prototype of his future reclusive and derisive protagonists, delivers a monologue to the narrator's father. The father is a physician, whom the narrator is accompanying on his round of patient visits. During the course of the monologue, the Prince paradoxically reveals his life and death as recorded by his son (the device of the narrator having a double who reconstructs the story recurs throughout Bernhard's work). The major point of the Prince's monologue, as well as of what are in effect monologues of all Bernhard's key players, is that it is just that—a monologue. So wrapped up in his own ego and his creation of it, he is incapable of having an exchange with anyone else—including his own father or his own son. What redeems him, however, besides the fact that he is extraordinarily articulate, perceptive, and [self-] educated, is his conscious acceptance of the impossibility of having a dialogue: “We