A Comparative Reading of Shih-Wei Wang’s I Am the Wind: Jon Fosse’s I Am the Wind and A Shining — Exploring the Oceans of the Inner World

Written by / Hong-You Zhao
Production photos provided by  Taipei Performing Arts Center
Managing Editor / Sea Huang
Copy Editor / Sea Huang 

Before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Jon Olav Fosse had already established himself as one of Norway’s most celebrated literary figures. In 2010, he was awarded the prestigious international Ibsen Award (Den internasjonale Ibsenprisen), further affirming his significance within the world of theatre.

If this summary seems too straightforward, allow me to introduce another figure for comparison: a decade later, another world-renowned writer received the same honour—and would go on to claim the Nobel Prize in Literature even sooner. He was Peter Handke, the author of Offending the Audience (Publikumsbeschimpfung, 1966). For their Nobel recognition, Fosse arrived only four years later than Handke.

Although Jon Fosse is best known as a playwright, theatre was not his first literary calling. As a young writer devoted primarily to novels and poetry, he was commissioned by the Norwegian government to write a play. Needing the income, Fosse accepted the commission and went on to write Someone Is Going to Come (Nokon kjem til å komme, 1993). The play proved to be a breakthrough, quickly gaining international acclaim and becoming his most performed piece.

Beyond his work as a playwright, Jon Fosse has also devoted himself to nurturing the next generation of writers. While teaching at the Hordaland Academy of Writing (Skrivekunst-akademiet i Hordaland) in Bergen, he mentored numerous emerging authors. Among them was Karl Ove Knausgård, the writer who would later shake the Norwegian literary scene with his monumental six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle (Min kamp, 2009–2011). Published in Taiwan by ECUS Publishing House, Knausgård’s My Struggle series became a literary phenomenon. Through an expansive form of “semi-autobiographical autofiction,” Knausgård excavated the details of his private life on an unprecedented scale, deliberately blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. The series sparked a reading frenzy in Norway—along with considerable controversy. Vast in length and overflowing with the raw material of everyday existence, the work seemed to gather everything into its current, from the mundane to the profound. In an interview, Knausgård has spoken explicitly about the influence of Fosse’s early writing on his own work, while also recalling his first impression of his former teacher:

“I was nineteen years old, and Fosse was twenty-nine. He was a pale young man who always had a cigarette in his hand. He was shy, nervous, yet utterly confident in what he was doing and in literature itself.”

In Taiwan, however, readers’ awareness of Fosse may only have begun with the publication of A Shining (Kvitleik, 2025), his first work to appear in Chinese translation in September 2025.

I Am the Wind (Eg er vinden, 2007) was commissioned by the Bergen International Festival, which invited Jon Fosse to create a new work for the occasion. Whether reading or watching I Am the Wind, one immediately senses its tightly controlled rhythm of sound. The play’s only two characters—“One” and “The Other”—enter the stage already sailing toward an unknown destination. Throughout their journey, they endure and challenge each other’s brief, sparse responses. They absorb one another’s anxieties while continuously probing deeper into the desires hidden within the human interior, attempting to grasp the wind and transform the intangible into stone.

I Am the Wind does not rely on the audience’s understanding of its narrative to achieve sensory pleasure. Paradoxically, the very pleasure of the work lies in placing the audience in a state of uncertainty toward everything unfolding on stage, directing their attention instead toward the dialectical relationship between “One” and “The Other.” Fosse indeed hopes that readers, like the characters in the first half of the play, may become “lost in the wind.” As he writes in his guidance for the production team:

“The setting of I Am the Wind takes place on an imaginary boat—one that may not even suggest a boat at all. All movements also exist within the realm of imagination. They do not necessarily need to be physically performed, but should instead evoke associations.”

In Jon Fosse’s works, listening to the rhythms he carefully constructs is essential to understanding his writing. In his Nobel Lecture, Fosse spoke explicitly about his relationship between writing and music:

“If I were to find a metaphor for the act of writing, it would have to be listening… At some point during my adolescence, I gradually shifted from being simply fascinated by music to becoming more drawn to writing. In fact, I completely stopped playing and listening to music, and began to write instead.”

What is the relationship between music and writing? In I Am the Wind, the two converge distinctively. This convergence is not an abstract, metaphysical concept; rather, it requires only one thing: listening. Through listening, we begin to hear the “rhythm” of the dialogue itself:

The Other: You want to be alone.
One: I cannot be alone.
The Other: You cannot be alone, and you cannot remain where there are other people.
One: I cannot bear these noises.
The Other: You want silence.
One: I want silence.
(A very brief pause.)
And I want
not everything to be seen so clearly.

He wants silence. He does not want to be alone. He does not want everything to be seen so clearly…So what is it that he truly “wants”? Are they merely chasing “a blur” in vain? To approach this question, we may turn to Fosse’s more recent work, A Shining (Kvitleik), which he completed and published in 2023.

A Shining (Kvitleik) explores the “journey” of liminality before death. The protagonist suffers a car accident at the very beginning, and time freezes. He begins to perceive and pursue a distant yet ever-shifting flash of light before him—sometimes drawing near, sometimes fading away. Within this light, he encounters his parents, with whom he exchanges a few brief words. The entire novel unfolds without any paragraph breaks, consisting solely of the protagonist’s extended monologue as he attempts to trace, comprehend, and clarify the reality of his own situation until the very end.

Throughout the novel, as philosophy professor Chin-Ching Chi observes in his foreword, what fascinates and occupies Jon Fosse appears to be a certain primordial, almost transcendental experience: a state that exists before events and before time itself, where nothing truly happens, and yet a form of experience is already present. How does one construct such a space of extremity? Fosse’s answer is found at the threshold of death: somewhere between life and demise.

He stretches this moment into infinity, slowing it down until it eventually grants the characters a sense of happiness and serenity. In his novels, time disappears. Time no longer holds meaning. The “happiness” Fosse seeks to capture can only emerge in the darkroom once time itself has ceased to matter.

Looking back at I Am the Wind from A Shining, this odyssey into the self has always oscillated between movement and fragmentation. “One” and “The Other” initially discover a harbor shaped like an island, where they intend to anchor and rest. Yet “The Other” remains hesitant and conflicted, uncertain whether to stay aboard the boat or continue onward toward the harbor.

Throughout this entire voyage, no one is concerned with time; time itself seems not to exist. We may therefore imagine it as an inner journey across the “sea of consciousness,” a voyage through which two opposing impulses within the human mind struggle against one another.

The conflict between “One” and “The Other” ultimately stems from their differing visions of purpose and life itself. On the boat, “One” finds solace in the sea—he wishes to remain surrounded by the vast ocean, standing on the deck and facing the wind and waves. “The Other,” however, imagines life differently. He fears a voyage without end; although he does not fully understand what lies ahead, he continues to long for the shore.

We do not know what wounds “One” carries, but he aspires to become the wind because the wind is free, unbound, and without form. “One” dislikes himself, feeling as if a stone, a piece of concrete, or a wall, burdened by the weight and suffering of being alive, so desperately seeking to become “the wind.”

Facing the vast ocean, “One” insists on moving toward the horizon without end, disregarding “The Other’s” anxiety. Eventually, standing on the deck, “One” imagines the stillness of the sea. As fierce winds and heavy fog descend, he jumps overboard. “The Other” throws him a life jacket and casts a boat hook toward him, but “One” refuses to respond to either. He sinks beneath the waves, completely surrendering his desire to survive—even pushing the boat hook away. In the final moments of the play, only “The Other’s” solitary monologue remains, as he speaks to the audience of his fear and anguish.

“One” says that this is what he wanted—he has become the wind. Why? Because “the ocean is too weightless / and only the wind possesses such movement.”

When the play reveals the meaning behind “I am the wind,” we immediately understand that the desire to become the wind is, in fact, a desire to bring an end to oneself. Here, ending one’s life is not presented as an act of violence, but as a passage toward peace.

In conclusion, Fosse seems to suggest that the end of life is not darkness, but the discovery of an unprecedented tranquility, perhaps even a form of happiness.

As the only participating witness, what does “The Other” truly see? Looking back from the ending toward the beginning, the play takes on a different resonance. “The Other” appears to have witnessed “One” attempting to end his own life many times before, though each attempt failed. As the person who did not leave, his act of remembering carries profound significance.

To remember people becoming the wind; to remember one’s own fear; to remember the desire to disappear, is also to remember thyself. Because the two characters remain unnamed, we as audiences are able to see ourselves reflected in them. The magic of I Am the Wind lies in the question it leaves us with: is it possible that the one who ultimately becomes the wind is a part of ourselves?

Recently, in discussions surrounding the viral debate over Huang Shanliao’s books, Taiwanese online creator Domidolo introduced the widely shared “pond metaphor.” In a similar sense, I Am the Wind is also a deep well: when we look into its depths as the final audience (ourselves,) what reflection of our own face will we see?

2026 Taipei Arts Festival: Wang Shih-Wei’s I Am the Wind

Date: 18–20 September 2026
Venue: Taipei Performing Arts Center — Blue Box
Tickets: Available via OPENTIX: https://tpacplayer.org/3hxrT

“Under some extreme circumstances, language fails. Only silence can convey the trembling of the soul.” This is a belief that Fosse has consistently held.

After completing I Am the Wind (Eg er vinden) in 2007, Fosse stepped away from playwriting due to physical and emotional exhaustion brought on by years of intensive writing. More than a decade later, he returned to theatre with a renewed poetic precision. Structurally, I Am the Wind departs almost entirely from the conventions of traditional drama: there is no backstory, no explicit conflict, no clear motivation, and even the characters’ social identities are stripped away.

For Fosse, the musicality of words, the force of silence, and the weight of pauses are far more significant than plot or character development. His work explores waiting—the painful state of being suspended between reality and desire, searching for a resolution that may never arrive. Within an immense emptiness where almost nothing exists, “pauses” and “silence” become monumental. Fosse invites us to hear this silence and to see this absence. Within this blank space—both ecstatic and terrifying—he repeatedly examines the boundaries between life and death, solitude and the divine.

Director Wang Shih-Wei’s creative philosophy of “putting down the map and returning to the text” resonates deeply with Fosse’s pursuit of breaking free from the constraints of meaning and reaching what he describes as the “absolute intensity of pure sensation.”

Today, we find ourselves in an era overflowing with words, yet one in which language is increasingly losing its ability to communicate. “Silence” may initially leave us disoriented, but it can also open a profound encounter: the question of how to confront the weight of existence emerges before us with an urgency that cannot be avoided.

Nearly two decades after its premiere, I Am the Wind continues to hold enduring contemporary relevance. Through collaboration with artists across disciplines, Wang reimagines the relationship between theatre, spectatorship, and perception, inviting audiences not only to understand a story, but to enter a sensory experience in which the body and time become deeply intertwined.