In Kaspar, Peter Handke's protagonist learns to master language only to become the victim of language: a man destroyed by his instrument of communication. “The last thought I had on Kaspar became the first thought to The Ride Across Lake Constance,” Handke wrote in his notes for the Berlin premiere of his last play. This thought was “to demonstrate the modes of human interchange in our society by means of precise observation.—The first attempts to define these observations were the plays My Foot My Tutor and Quodlibet, in which theatre forms appeared isolated from plots, so that these forms became poses and could become identical with poses in daily life: the representation of the theatre poses was, among other things, an attempt to present the modes of everyday behavior as poses, too.”