Ein fließender Raum: Die Zeitauffassung Musils im Mann ohne Eigenschaften

This article explores the issue of time in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities and emphasizes that the novelist himself fundamentally differentiates between narrative time and real time. The thesis of this article is that the experience of timelessness and the spatialization of time in the novel do not primarily concern the atemporality of real time but should be understood as epistemological narrative constructs of constantly changing life. Although spatialized, temporality in the novel maintains flow, and this is necessary for the novel's foundational concern with possibility and the sense of possibility.