[Handke] uses all the old-modern tricks. In one of his plays not a single word is spoken. In another, the characters are to be given the names of the actors who play them. These devices are intended to disorient the spectators, to deny them the familiar naturalistic illusions, the comforts of character and narrative. By now these distancing effects are as stale as any of the conventions of the well-made play and have built up their own expectations in the audience. The confections of their originators—Jarry, Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett—seem … stagey … and enjoyable…. [You] soon pick up the resonances of Ubu or Godot in They Are Dying Out or The Ride Across Lake Constance. But just because Handke derives his techniques from so many of the standard modern sources, it may be easier to isolate the individuality and consistency of his themes.

Handke is preoccupied with domination, with the systematic ways in which one human being acquires and wields power over another and the ways that this shapes the behaviour, aspirations and prejudices of both owner and owned. In My Foot, My Tutor, the two characters are actually called Ward and Warden and they carry out an elaborate silent pantomime of copying and modifying one another's gestures and actions. (p. 33)

Everything we say and do, however apparently noble, touching, loving or courageous, is in reality the end-product of social processes which are based on the domination of one human being by another. We must not be deceived by the glitter of quartz crystals into endowing them with divine properties or supreme value; they are merely geological formations. And it is essential above all that we should realise this, we should not wrap up unpleasant realities in false emotion. This is the first rule, and the second, which follows from it, is to accept only the evidence of your own feelings here and now. You must not let memory or external authority play tricks with you….

This distrustful egoism is the attitude of the narrator of Handke's second semi-autobiographical novel, Short Letter, Long Farewell….

He says that "often in the past I had been overcome by confusion and disgust at the thought that someone was different from myself."…

The reality for Handke is that relationships are fraudulent and ephemeral. Human beings do not and cannot belong to each other. Each man belongs only to himself, and is answerable only to his own consciousness. Even nature cannot get him "out of himself."…

The narrator … justifies his egoism by a political argument. His grievance against the social system permeates his view of nature; his melancholy and disgust are legitimised and ennobled by his perception of political injustice. (p. 34)

This trick of overworking the sense of injustice, of politicising the whole visible universe for literary effect is again employed in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Handke's fictional memoir of his mother. Here the narrator builds up a grim picture of life in rural Carinthia and implies that the grimness is a consequence of all the decent land in the neighbourhood belonging to the church or to noble landowners. For practical purposes, life is just as hard as it had been before the formal abolition of serfdom in 1848. Life, particularly for women, is run on tramlines. The narrator's mother was high-spirited and would not tolerate this predictable, cramped existence…. Her attempts to get away in body or in mind demonstrate the suffocating tyranny of an apparently idyllic mountain village. Finally she kills herself. Her son writes this memoir to shake off the dull speechlessness with which he reacted to the news of her suicide. It is the system of property relations which grinds people down, robs them of themselves, deprives them of the capacity or even the wish to talk about themselves, to articulate their feelings and aspirations. (p. 35)

A still bleaker picture … is to be found in The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. Joseph Bloch, unemployed building worker, formerly a goalkeeper, picks up the cashier at the cinema, sleeps with her and then strangles her, apparently for no reason. He then makes his way to a country inn where he lies low, spending his time watching the trivial, purposeless routine of village life. He is obsessively aware of his own sensations and of each tiny sight or sound that they record. Yet he shows very little interest in his own fate and hardly seems conscious of what he has done.

Consider for a moment the salient elements in these three fictions: the unattached hero recoiling from emotional attachment, his indifference to morality, his lack of overt reaction to his mother's death, the girl he picks up casually (either a stranger or passing acquaintance), the apparently motiveless murder of another person. Is there not something familiar about them? Mix them all in together and you have Camus' L'Etranger very nearly in its entirety. I do not adduce this coincidence, remarkable though it is, in order to stress how derivative Handke's themes are or to deny his undeniable qualities as a writer. At its best, his writing is haunting and intense. But L'Etranger remains the classic literary study in alienation; it lacks Handke's vulgar Marxist gloss and it has the further advantage for critics that Camus left us in no doubt as to what he intended. (pp. 35-6)

We are instructed to admire Meursault [in L'Etranger] for his authenticity, his refusal to surrender to the pieties or to suppress his feelings. Handke's protagonists are by contrast primarily the victims of social processes. And yet it is surely intended that we should admire them too for their exercise of inner freedom, their refusal to slip into the fraudulent slime of human relationships, the dignity, however pitiful, of their solitude. For their apparent refusal to ask for sympathy or affection, we are to accord them both. From Werther to Handke, the low-spirited egoist has been tugging at the intelligentsia's heartstrings. A touch of the psychopath has only intensified his farouche charm. (p. 36)

To say that Peter Handke's mother had a sad life because she did not understand her social situation is both to patronise her and to trivialise her fate. These slick elisions between the life of an individual and the structure of a society are anything but humanist, in that they take man to be such an easily degradable substance.

The young Handke no less than the young Camus demonstrates in his work that his concept of the individual is both inconsistent and dishonest. To accept Mersault's one virtue—his refusal to lie about his own feelings—as a proof of his authenticity is to accept a pathetically shrivelled view of "a free man." If that phrase is to carry any real force, it must surely entail the idea of man as a responsible agent, not a being whose only free actions are the honest expression of his impulses but one who also stretches his consciousness to take account of the consequences of his actions and the relationship between them.

It is of the essence of what we mean by a free agent that he should know what he is doing. If a man lies or murders without having a reason "of his own", that suggests that he is acting in accordance with the reasons of others. He is under the compulsion of biology, or society, or another person. The supposedly gratuitous act is gratuitous only in the sense that the reasons for it are not the conventional ones. The "gratuitous" murderer may have one of several reasons—desire to demonstrate his indifference to bourgeois morality or his coolness of nerve, wish to revenge himself on the world as a whole rather than on the particular victim which entails random selection of that victim, pleasure in killing and so on. But to describe a person who has no reasons of his own for his action as "free" is to rob the term freedom of any meaning. Freedom is inseparable from the idea of agency. (pp. 36-7)

The reader's sympathy is abused not because Handke taps it on behalf of people who feel cut off from the ordinary worlds of thought and feeling and who find themselves unable to make natural and authentic connections with other people. The abuse lies in the way he exploits that real and specific pathos to illustrate and strengthen political morals which may not properly be derived from it….

Handke's … radical critique of society rests on evidence which is tangential, fragmentary, and equivocal. The bold outlines of a political manifesto cannot be given dramatic form by a cast of vague and elusive characters. The appeal of the cryptic, bitter melancholy which Handke's writing at its best exhales cannot, with any degree of integrity, be pressed into the service of the modish crudities of a New Left. (p. 37)