Auf der Spur des Dialogischen? Eine Analyse ausgewählter Erzählungen von Thomas Bernhard

When analysing dialogues in modern prose works we often encounter problems with their reception, problems so significant that a question arises whether what we deal with are indeed dialogue sequences. We face such a dilemma also in the case of the works by the Austrian prose writer Thomas Bernhard. His dialogues seem to be melted into the narration, they seem to submerge in the narration and it is difficult to state where they reappear, where they emerge again. The author does not care about the cohesion, what is more, he does not even seem to care about the coherence of the dialogue sequences. The paper is an attempt at placing Bernhard’s dialogues on a broad scale of dialogicity. What is also researched are the possibilities of applying linguistic perspectives on dialogue with respect to literary texts.