Abstrakt
Observing and describing, together with tireless questioning and inquiring, are at the centre of many discussions and soliloquies of Franz Kafka's and Thomas Bernhard's characters. The characters strive to understand the world, but they never come to a satisfying conclusion: it is always possible to ask yet another question.
Thinking, an endeavour to understand, is thus doomed to collapse and so are the characters. They fail, go insane, die or they never begin to live.
There are motifs by means of which Kafka and Bernhard give expression to the question of thinking, as well as to differences in what they believe to be the core of the problem. By drawing on Bernhard's novels Gehen, Alte Meister and Holzfällen, and on selected works of Kafka, the author focuses on the reasons why for Kafka and Bernhard observing fails as the path to knowledge, why knowledge is deemed deceptive and why (and how) thinking has to be mastered if one is to remain sane and capable of action.