TÖRLESS, THE PUPIL

The famous author of The Man Without Qualities (1930), the austrian writer Robert Musil, published his first novel The Confusions of Young Törless (1906) while studying in Berlin. Törless story resembles in many aspects the one of its own author in youth years. The somewhat abnormal, unnatural and perverse relationships which evolve between the people living isolated inside a military institution with a rigid discipline, which belongs to the former austrian-hungarian empire, during the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, are the main theme of the book. As an intern on this school ("collegium"), Törless, away from his family like all the other students, observes the dehumanizing routine and writes long letters to his family in an attempt to recover some of the past's balance, feeling nostalgic of his own family's "healthy" environment. Still the hate and irrationality conquer their own ground and end up dominating the relationships among and between students, teachers, school workers. In such a way that the stronger ones unite to damage and humiliate the weak, the sick environment of blackmails expands itself, sexuality follows the possible and tortuous paths, sadism governs and masochism attends. Nobody nor anything reigns, except brutality and hostility. We should finally situate this novel in time, and perceive how the pre-1stWW tensions are so influential and present on the criticisms to the military system and to the way how this one abandons boys to a cruel self-growth.