Themes and Meanings

(Literary Essentials: World Fiction)

Concrete is an existential novel that deals with the isolation of consciousness from the world and the endless suffering that this estrangement causes in the individual. In the existential philosophies of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, the mind is fundamentally different from all being. Human beings are creatures who live not in the present, like animals, but in the future and are thus tormented by the awareness of eventual and unavoidable death. Life is viewed as a vale of tears in which one only suffers. Most people do all they can to avoid acknowledging such a truth. Nihilism and pessimism are attitudes that often accompany such gloomy, yet true, ideas. The intellectual and pessimistic narrator of the novel mentions Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Fyodor Dostoevski in his reflections and thereby clearly aligns himself with this tradition of existential thought.

The title of the novel suggests the impotence and paralysis of consciousness in reality. It is as if consciousness is stuck in “concrete,” unable to move, fixed and unfree. The narrator’s constant hesitation and his inability to take decisive action also indicate the image of the immobility and paralysis of consciousness. This inability to move and act as a result of a hyperintellectuality is a frequent theme in Bernhard’s writings.

The narrator’s failed efforts to write his treatise again point out his entrapment within his own mind....

(The entire section is 404 words.)