The Square Root of minus One: Freud and Robert Musil's Torless

Abstract

W ITH THE publication in the United States in recent years of such distinguished novels of adolescent crisis as J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and John Knowles' A Separate Peace (1961), it is finally clear that the novel of youthful initiation has become a distinct literary genre in our century. There are, to be sure, important nineteenth-century examples-Juan Valera's Pepita Jimenez (1874),1 Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885), and a whole spate of French novels of adolescence in the late 1880s and 1890s which