8 - Ulrich as ‘Man without Qualities’

Summary

As an older man looks back over his earlier life, he forms an opinion of it, seeing and judging his younger self from the vantage point of experience and hindsight. However, as we have seen in our examination of the theme of ‘Wirklichkeit’, Musil does not always manage in Part I and Part II of The Man without Qualities to make this historical and moral judgement sufficiently clear to his readers.

We can see that Ulrich, this relatively young man living in Vienna in 1913, is suffering from a surfeit of unproductive thought; his intellectuality is too inward-looking and has become a prison. No thought seems reliable, no belief tenable, no action worthwhile. Though Ulrich, at the outset of The Man without Qualities, does not represent the intellectual and moral position of the mature Musil, the fact that many critics think that he does – that they believe that the kinds of things which Ulrich thinks and says throughout The Man without Qualities can be put together to form the ‘Collected Wisdom of Robert Musil’ – is sufficient indication of a failure by Musil to make his mature position stand out. Perhaps this is partly because Musil did not finish The Man without Qualities. Part I and Part II make up by far the larger section of the material which Musil published; these Parts of The Man without Qualities present, as I shall show below, the hero before his attitude to the world matures.