A Resolute Thomas Bernhard

This paper proposes a resolute reading of Thomas Bernhard’s prose in analogy with the resolute readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Drawing on the interpretive frame work developed by Diamond and Conant, it argues that Bernhard’s obsessive monologues and strategies of nonsense operate performatively, compelling the reader to undergo a process analogous to the Tractarian dissolution of the illusion of sense. Bernhard’s fiction enacts a literary dialectic in which exaggerated, self-effacing discourse exposes its own nonsensicality, leading the reader to a transformation of perspective. Reading Bernhard resolutely thus coheres with critical accounts of Bernhard’s performative and theatrical prose, in which self-destructive patterns of thought are staged rather than endorsed.