Gellen's essay takes encouragement from Susan Sontag's critique of critical distance by questioning her own attachment to Bernhard's work: "why am I so drawn to him? And why, in turn, am I drawn to writers who are explicitly and implicitly drawn to him, too?". Her answer is that Bernhard and those drawn to his example offer a way out of the purely negative model of failing to write. When I asked myself this question, I realised that my attempts to write something about the chance events in Bernhard's work had always failed to begin because it isn't what had long fascinated me at all. It was that the chance events always happened at the beginning of a prose-text. Beginning is what had long fascinated me, or, rather, how Bernhard's novels continue to begin and don't stop beginning until they end.

It appears to be because twists in the tale, that a staple of storytelling, always appear at the beginning of Bernhard's work, with walking playing a role in them all. He began his adult life by refusing to return to the TB clinic for life-saving treatment. He walked in the opposite direction to what was wise and never went back, and began his life as a writer by going in the opposite direction to singing. He explains in the film monologue Drei Tage that:

the thing I find most terrifying is writing prose…it’s pretty much the most difficult thing for me…And the moment I realized this and became conscious of it, I swore to myself that from then on I would do nothing but write prose.

There is nothing wise in Thomas Bernhard's life and work: he caught tuberculosis also by going in the opposite direction. In the third part of his autobiography, he says that as a fifteen-year-old he chose to work in a bitterly cold grocery store in "the roughest and most dangerous district" of Salzburg after rejecting all the jobs in the safer, wealthier areas, telling the official he "wanted to go in the opposition direction". He uses the phrase thirteen times over two pages: "she offered me a number of apprenticeships, but none of them was in the opposite direction", I did not just want to go in a different direction – it had to be the opposite direction".

I kept on telling her this, but she was not to be put off and went on taking what she regarded as good addresses out of her card-index. I was unable to explain to her what I meant by the opposite direction.   (Tr. David McLintock)

He must have known at some level. It may well be a physical equivalent of Paul Celan's Gegenwort, the "counterword" he spoke about in his Meridian speech, which Dowden compares to in literary terms to Bernhard's "speaking against: against exhausted narrative ploys and forms" and "against Austria's complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century". And given that Celan's example of a counterword is spoken before an execution, Bernhard's life decisions might be compared to the Persian woman's answer to the narrator's question at the end of Yes, or perhaps Roithamer's self-destruction in the forest clearing: in Celan's own words the counterword is "an act of freedom. It is a step."

From Steve Mitchelmore's 'The Opposite Direction'