While his career as a playwright reached its apex in Bochum, Bernhard spent much more time in Vienna[….] His newfound urbanity was reflected in his fiction. Like Bernhard himself, his narrators had grown up. They were adults, in their middle years. No longer hopelessly mired in the infectious squalor of Alpine decay, they became skilled survivors of terminal diseases. Like Bernhard, they know their time is limited. They tell their stories in one breath, before death can catch up with them. Their perspective, although they may live in the country, is urban. Narcissistically, they watch themselves perform their agonies of outraged estrangement and despairing quests for genius. Knowing their performances are matches with death, they enjoy the antics of the game. What makes them survive their genuine pain is their skill at sustaining the game at match point, as it were, the thrill of their own mastery. Not uncertain about the imminent outcome, they, like Bernhard, claim the classic fool's privileges. Their hyperbole is reality rendered from the margins of temporality. Performance is all – self-performance, that is, which includes the art of watching oneself perform and watching oneself watching oneself perform.

Gitta Honegger, Thomas Bernhard