Person without personality (Part 1 & 2)

Author: Robert Musil
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2000-12-01
Features: People without personality are as absurd as waiting for Godot. The story takes place in Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A committee was formed to prepare for the celebration of the 70th anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph's reign in 1918. That same year, Germany would celebrate the 30th anniversary of Emperor Wilhelm II's reign. Therefore, Austria's action was called the "Parallel Action." However, 1918 was exactly the year when both kingdoms fell. Ulrich is the secretary of this committee and the central figure of this novel. When the plot begins in August 1913, he is 32 years old. Before that, he had made three attempts to become someone of significance. But his attempts to become an officer, an engineer, and a mathematician had not yielded results that satisfied him. In the end, he realized that for him, possibilities were more important than the moderate, rigid reality. Since he could no longer find "the whole order" in an extremely technologically advanced era, he decided to take a "year-long sabbatical from life" to understand the "causes and secret mechanisms" of a reality that had been broken down into parts. As a result, Ulrich adopted a passive, reflective attitude toward external things. He felt he was a person without personality because he no longer saw people as the center of modern reality, but rather material: "Today, a world without personality has emerged, a world of experience without experience." Ulrich finds himself forced to confront the problems of his time, the confrontation between logic and emotion, causality and identity. He realizes that for him, possibilities are more important than the moderate, rigid reality. He feels he is a person without personality because he no longer sees people as the center of modern reality. Musil did not paint a portrait of a bygone era but attempted to grasp and portray the typical characteristics of the spiritual state of Austrian society before the World War. This is the path Musil in this long novel.