Bernhard could have made better use of his lengthy hospital visits: he speaks of the 'death ward' or the 'theatre'-not operating theatre but one where the patients are marionettes connected to machines by strings not tubes. From these experiences he develops a system of pointlessness-
getting up in the morning to face a pointless task, then setting to work and thinking oneself into bitter pointlessness'-something his grandfather had done each day starting at 3.0am. He should have further developed the idea of 'theatre' and gone in the direction of Kafka's
Burrow and there encountered
calculated pointlessness.The burrower richly pays for his underground castle keep by pounding the loose sand with his forehead thousands and thousands of times to harden it; Bernhard never got to the bottom of pointlessness.
