Lack of any profound essence and ambiguity as a general attitude to life are his principal characteristics.
Ulrich himself only knows he is strangely indifferent to all his qualities. Musil once said that it is not particularly difficult to describe Ulrich in his main features. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude. His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being "a man without qualities", depending on the outer world to form his character.
Part I, titled A Sort of Introduction, is an introduction to the protagonist, a 32-year-old mathematician named Ulrich who is in search of a sense of life and reality but fails to find it. The book is well over a thousand pages long in its entirety, and no one single theme dominates. It has a particular concern with the values of truth and opinion and how society organizes ideas about life and society. The novel is a "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy's last days, and the plot often veers into allegorical digressions on a wide range of existential themes concerning humanity and feelings. The Man Without Qualities ( German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 1930–1943) is an unfinished modernist novel in three volumes and various drafts, by the Austrian writer Robert Musil. 1,130 (the core text) 1,774 (complete English translation)
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