The specter of death in two of Thomas Bernhard’s narratives

The loser and Woodcutters

Abstract

In the novels of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, the death of someone close to the narrator serves as a motive for him to begin the account of his memories. Our objective is to verify how the statute of death configures the literary space in two of Bernhard’s works, The loser (1983) and Woodcutters (1984). Considering that death occurs through suicide in these novels, it will be used as a theoretical foundation: The Seminar: book X – Anxiety, a book in which Jacques Lacan points to suicide (or passage to the act) as a form found by a subject to leave a scene they could no longer endure through words. Thereby, we will approach how the contact with death reverberates in the narrator’s subjectivity, inasmuch as death also is responsible for his return to Austria, a country from where he has always tried to disentangle himself.