In their repetitions, their eddies of obsession, their personal entanglements and subtle variations, each monologist can resemble a comedian delivering seemingly off-the-cuff material, which is in reality highly practiced and refined. Callbacks serve to broaden and deepen the effect of each rant. Positions are taken, qualified, reversed. There is a dimensionality to these attacks, as if an idea has accumulated physical mass. Take Koller, for instance, on “the masses”:

Ninety-nine percent of all people sold out to the masses at the very moment of their birth, so he said. But any person of the mind was obliged to take up the struggle against the masses, to take a stand against them, to declare his opposition to them, at the very moment of his birth; that alone legitimated him as a person of the mind. Anybody who yielded to these masses, be it even on a single point, had forfeited his chance to be a person of the mind and was a mindless person. That every person of the mind naturally always had the masses and hence, to put it dramatically, the whole of humankind ineluctably against him as a matter of course, was transparently clear. . . . Everybody, even those who struggled against these masses and hence against feeblemindedness, ultimately hailed from these masses, and it was only logical and natural at the same time that they were gobbled back up by these masses.

Bernhard offers a formal attentiveness to refrain worthy of the villanelle or the roundel. These furious assaults contain a chorus-like center, an idea or judgment brought round again and again in habituating action; the original position is exhaustively established only to be abandoned after every possible reinforcement has already been made. But the patterning of Koller’s phrasing is as much structural as it is musical. Each recurrence of “the masses” is like a nail driven down at the edge of a billowing tent. It fastens the passage to the page amid great storms of extemporizing. Modification (“person of the mind,” “mindless person,” “feeblemindedness”) and exaggeration (“at the very moment,” “that alone,” “be it even on a single point,” “the whole of human kind”) prolong the attack or position it beyond retort. The final feint at rationality—“it was only logical and natural”—cheekily suggests the whole thing would have occurred to anyone had they only considered the matter more carefully. Bernhard is always extending these invitations to complicity. 

From 'OldMaster', Dustin Illingworth on Berhard in The Baffler.