The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick Characters

The figure of Joseph Bloch has several sources. The character is based, in part, on a psychiatric study of schizophrenia which Peter Handke read in 1968. This work describes a type of disturbed thought process called apophanic perception, in which the patient perceives random objects as having some secret meaning, usually of paranoid significance. The usual contexts that establish meaning in the everyday world are lost during this state of mental delusion, and the patient’s environment becomes a shifting complex of hostile and threatening dimensions. In an interview, Handke claimed that this was one of the best books he had read that year.

Bloch’s character is also intended to represent certain ideas Handke came across in his readings of structuralist and semiological thinkers and writers such as Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The central notion here is that reality, or rather one’s perception of it, is deeply influenced by language. Discussing this novel in another interview, Handke claimed that Bloch’s behavior is only an exaggerated form of what is found in everyday perception, that his tendency to construct reality is essentially typical of all people.

A third source for the figure of Joseph Bloch is Handke’s own experience. According to Handke, all writers have occasional schizophreniclike states of mind, almost mystical moments of transcendence when they are transported from the regularity of the everyday world. The world of the imagination is one of “unreality” or fantasy. Such moments are often the origin for the creative energy that fuels artistic activity. Bloch, in this work, exhibits extreme versions of tendencies present in the author himself.