SOURCE: "Looking Inside: Unions," in Robert Musil, Continuum, 1989, pp. 43-57.

An American critic and educator, Bangerter is the author of German Writing since 1945 (1988) as well as studies of Johann Schiller and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In the following exerpt, he argues that the "unions" referred to in the title of Unions are ones that take place within the protagonists rather than between individuals.

An important distinguishing feature of Musil's literary art is the deliberate de-emphasis of structured plot and sequential narrative in favor of illustrating and illuminating his ideas about mortal existence. Characters and their relationships become the vehicles that the author uses to explore theme variations and possibilities for response to the phenomena, problems, and questions of human life. In the slender volume Unions, which contains the two novellas The Perfecting of a Love and The Temptation of Quiet Veronica, Musil experimented with a creative technique that pushed...