He writes that ‘the sick are inevitably condemned to protracted illness and eventual death. Doctors are victims of either megalomania or helplessness; in either case they can only harm the patient unless he himself takes the initiative.’ It is possible that one may only truly appreciate Bernhard if one has suffered a long illness oneself. One may derive pleasure from him, one may even enjoy him, but one can only love Bernhard if one has spent months lying on one’s back helpless to do anything else, if one has seen the spectre of death toiling beneath one’s own skin, or heard it rattle in one’s chest, fearing that there is no cure. This is the root of his appeal: he makes us laugh precisely when he insists most outrageously that there is no cure, not for sickness or anything else. To again quote E.M. Cioran, whose statement about Beckett applies equally to Bernhard: ‘He is a destroyer who adds to existence — who enriches by undermining it.’ [...]

At around the age of 32, he wrote that ‘Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline form of hopelessness . . . There is only one way to go, through the snow and ice into despair; past the adultery of reason.’ Of Strauch, the painter whose endless rants fill his first novel, Frost, the narrator says: ‘He is one of those people who refuse to say anything at all, and yet are continually driven to say everything.’ As Gombrowicz puts it: ‘One can be all the more human the more one is inhuman.’

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, we glimpse him in certain pictures — wearing a snowball on top of his head, carousing on a hillside in his underwear, eating an ice cream cone, sitting on a park bench surrounded by children, or wearing lederhosen and cracking a joke among friends — and we say to ourselves: this could not have been a serious man. And we are right, in the sense that only an unserious man could have so splendidly dynamited so many façades, so delectably destroyed so many illusions. When we read of his final joke — simultaneously a last excoriation — the prohibition in his will of ever having any of his works published, performed, or even quoted aloud in his home country — we cannot help cackling. Such impertinence delights us. It makes us want to weep with joy that there ever was such a person amongst us as him. For as long as we continue to read him, he will continue to strip away what is stupid, false, and illusory in our own selves; we suspect that his work — that schoolroom in an abattoir, that devil where there would only be God — will never lose its urgency, nor we our need for it.

From Nate Knapp's 'We Earn Nothing But Chaos: Some Notes on Thomas Bernhard'.