Consider this scenario of a play. In the first act, the prelude, we are introduced to a rich, quarrelsome old woman known as the good person, who has lost her legs in an accident. She lives in a stately mansion and is waited on by a taciturn servant namedJohanna. The good person bickers with Johanna about nothing, and, though her servant could care less the good person insists on telling her why she decided to marry Boris, the ugliest of all the cripples without legs, who had lived in an asylum across from her mansion. In the next act, the ballroom, the good person is wheeled about by Johanna, pretends to be a queen, talks about the various dignitaries in the empty room, and then calls Boris only to berate him. In the final act, the party, thirteen couples from the asylum, all without legs, are invited to a birthday party for Boris. At one point, when Boris begins to play a drum, they complain about the sordid conditions in the asylum, especially about their small beds. They talk about collective suicide and their wish-fulfillment dreams. The good person promises to donate larger beds to the asylum to pacify them, and, as the party draws to a close, the cripples realize that Boris has stopped his drumming and is dead. They leave the good person alone with her dead Boris, and she explodes into terrifying laughter. Another play by Samuel Beckett? No. The author is Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian novelist and dramatist, born in 1931. The play is his first drama, Ein Festfur Boris (A Party for Boris, 1969), premiere in Hamburg, and it has been followed by a number of similar plays such as Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige (The Fool and the Madman, 1972), Die Macht und der Gewohnheit (The Force ofHabit, 1974) and Vor dem Ruhestand (The Eve ofRetirement, 1979). All these dramas might be described as being under the influence of Beckett, and one could easily be led to believe that Bernhard has an exceptional relationship to Beckett, and that his macabre and haunting plays merit a comparative study with those of the "classical" absurdist Beckett. However, Bernhard is not exceptional. One could point to a host of German and Austrian writers such as Giinter Grass, Hans Gfinter Michelsen, Wolfgang Hildeshemier, Martin Walser, Peter Handke, and Botho Strauss, who have written plays under the shadow of Beckett. One could even add the two famous Swiss-German writers Friedrich Diirrenmatt and Max Frisch to