The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)
At a glance:
- Author: Peter Handke
- First Published: 1970
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Psychological realism
- Time of Work: The late 1960’s
- Setting: Vienna and a small Austrian village
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: 1960’s, Perception, Murder or homicide, Mental illness, Austria or Austrians, Semiotics, Soccer
- Locales: Vienna, Austria
Characters Discussed
Joseph Bloch, a construction worker and former soccer goalie. Bloch is a young man when viewed from all perspectives except the game of soccer, which he used to play quite well. Unfortunately, his soccer days are behind him; this is unfortunate because he cannot accommodate himself to the far more complex and unpredictable world of an everyday reality that does not abide by the clear-cut rules of sport. Bloch’s paranoia is signaled in the novel’s opening paragraph, when he assumes that he has been fired because only the foreman looks at him when he...
[The entire page is 666 words long]
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