“Bernhard’s personal investments in his characters’ utterances are everywhere apparent - many plays, for example, include characters whose diatribes against Austria and Austrians resemble Bernhard’s own - more often than not those authorial commitments ar impossible to specify very precisely. In an early novel, for example (Der Italiener ), we encounter a narrator who says, “In my work, if I see the signs of a story developing anywhere, or if somewhere in the distance between the mountains of prose I spot even the hint of a story beginning to appear, I shoot it.” It is the same with sentences: I have the urge to take entire sentences and annihilate them before they can possilbly take shape. “Which is (as Bernard surely knew) almost precisely what Nazis liked to say of “culture”: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my Browning.” A character speaking and author speaking a Nazi propagandist: how does one come to terms with such intimidating abysses of personation? How does one distinguish the voice of the author from those of his represented personae?”
(Gruber, William. Missing Persons Character and Characterization in Modern Drama. from Mental Life Thomas Bernhard's Comic Types p. 109)
:: note :: . . . there are many connections between theatrical space and screen space . . . when I first started writing on the blog screen it was this connection I wished to explore and as always been the subtext for 'If' . .
