A room, steps, a bar, everything has been reduced to no more than bare necessity. It is this asceticism that makes the locations generally valid. Straub has omitted everything that struck him as too novel-like, stripping the work of literature to its bare bones. The main internal and external events now meet head-on, without any buffer zone, for they are no longer embedded in the linking narrative. Sometimes the dialogue comes very close to acoustic incomprehensibility, as Straub reduces the language to mere sound, and speech becomes meaningless garble.
Communication appears to be severely limited, even between the individual figures.