Yes (novel)

Yes is a novel by Thomas Bernhard, originally published in German in 1978 and translated into English by Ewald Osers in 1992.

This novel is about suicide, a topic that permeates overtly or covertly all of Bernhard’s work. A Persian woman is the central character of narration, and the narrator prepares for her suicide by his own preoccupation with suicide. This motif of the surrogate victim is clearly established in the novel's opening sentence ^{(see excerpt below)}, where the narrator describes himself as in the process of "dumping" his problems on his friend Moritz. Later, he will persist in making these revelations even though he recognizes that they have "wounded" Moritz. Similarly, he will underline the Persian woman's role as a surrogate victim when he refers to her as the ideal "sacrificial mechanism".

One could easily perceive that the woman fascinates the narrator, who finds in her a suitable companion in his solitary walks into the nearby forest, where he obsesses her with interminable disquisitions and philosophical rants. She is "an utterly regenerating person, that is an utterly regenerating walking and thinking and talking and philosophising partner such as I had not had for years".

Gradually the narrator goes back in time and recollects his first meetings with the Persian woman, uncovering a universe of loneliness where the only existential act left is confession. However, self-exposure not always engenders a benefit. Whilst the narrator undergoes a positive reaction, becoming once again attached to life and thus discarding suicide, the Persian woman is unable to unravel the knots of her painful social isolation and says a definitive "yes" to annihilation.

Literally, the woman arrived in this comically benighted corner of Upper Austria because her companion, a Swiss engineer, had chosen it as the ideal location in which to build his new house, right in the middle of a nearby thick forest. But the reader recognizes this realistic motivation as simply a pretext for arranging the sacrificial death that Bernhard intends for her. We glimpse this archetypal pattern from the very beginning of his narrative, when the narrator describes the woman as "regenerating" and perceives the arrival of the couple as signifying his "redemption". While the narrator himself has never been able to act on his own suicidal impulses, it was his insinuating words, as we learn in the novel's closing sentence, that provoked the woman's suicide. After she has committed suicide (by throwing herself in front of a cement truck), he remembers discussing the frequent suicide of young people and asking her if she would kill herself one day, to which she replies, in the novel's closing word, "Yes".