Izolacja
Isolation

The protagonists of Thomas Bernhard’s prose in the face of self-control and self-destruction madness

Author(s): Katarzyna Szymańska
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Film / Cinema / Cinematography, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Thomas Bernhard; Austrian literature; isolation; Holocaust; extinction
Summary/Abstract: The present paper approaches the self-destruction mechanisms in Thomas Bernhard’s prose works – at the level of the construction of characters, language and the image of the disintegrating world and objects. The protagonists stay in places of extreme isolation, which is both a prison and a salvation, and they put their own destruction (die Selbstzerstörung) under obsessive control. The existence of these disturbances (die Störungen) in the analyzed texts has a psychological but also a historiosophical basis.

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