A machine (short story)
A machine is a short story by Thomas Bernhard . She appeared in the volume Events .
content
A guillotine- like machine cuts rubber mass into pieces in a factory, which are then packed by unskilled workers. After the machine has been handed over to the factory management with great fuss and has been assembled, it has to be regularly serviced by a worker who is trained to the smallest detail. When it slips unhappily and is beheaded by the machine, the shocked assembly line workers know nothing more than to unpack the girl's head, as they are used to from the pieces of rubber.
Form and language
The linguistic design of the short prose is factual. Because almost all main clauses begin with an expression related to the machine, hypotaxes arise. The machine is personified, whereas the people more and more correspond to the characteristics of the machine. The short prose focuses on the idealization of the machine and less on the fatal accident of the worker. The narrator's drastic style in the last section is in discrepancy with the rest of the work, which is written in a factual style. It is interrupted by aggressive-sounding words such as "beheaded" (see line 16) and "bursts" (see line 16).
reception
- "Too great the effect, too enormous the violence emanating from the prose of the grim but also thoroughly humorous Austrian for one to be able to evade it by simply ignoring it."
publication
- Thomas Bernhard: Events , Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-40333-8
Web links
- A machine: reading , on vimeo.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ [1] ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
