Paraphrasing Finitude: Seeking Refuge from Death in Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew

Abstract: Thomas Bernhard's novella Wittgenstein's Nephew is typically read as a quasi-memoir about Bernhard's relationship with Paul Wittgenstein, the nephew of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. But Bernhard is up to something else. The novella dramatizes the different ways that language and storytelling defend against anxieties associated with illness and mortality. Bernhard is able to show this defense mechanism at work while simultaneously crafting a broken narrative that tells a story of its own, a story of an illness that cannot be contained in usual narrative threads and that asks for new forms of storytelling. He thus reveals at once both the concealing and disclosive potential of language in the face of illness as he finds innovative ways to embody the experience of illness in the very fabric of the text.