From this statement — “Melancholy is perhaps the ideal remedy or the only useful for me, continually taking tablets of melancholy...” —, this essay strives to define the role of the melancholy in Thomas Bernhard’s thinking. An antithesis to antidepressants, as it neither seeks the normalization of thought nor try to standardize the relation to the Other, the melancholy tablet generates an effect similar to the desperate will of lucidity that guide all of Bernhard’s narrators : a bipolar will to see the world in all its contradictions. Considered both as a survival medicine and an autoreflective device, melancholy in Bernhard’s work shows how the imperfection of thought is the engine of thought itself.