 A real sickness-unto-death is made into a fulcrum for survival in an arena which is the human condition understood as a condition of immitigable "deadlock".On its publication soon after Bernhard's death, "On the Mountain" was hailed as a "self-portrait of the artist as a young man" cast in the Schopenhauerian vein, and its high misanthropic tone and desolate humour do indeed anticipate all his subsequent work.Reviews described it as a "mighty prose poem," a masterly "debut and valedictory in one," an "early testament," full of pessimism and comical bleakness—Bernhard's case against intellectualised irrelevance, gripping and humane, where the nihilism of the 20th century found its most uncompromising expression.