"Like Ulrich, the hero of The Man Without Qualities, we can maintain a certain reserve toward the real world, a living sense of alternative possibilities. This reserve defines one as what Ulrich calls a “possibilitarian,” someone prepared to exist in “a web of haze, imaginings, fantasy and the subjunctive mode,” to live a “hovering life” without ideological commitment, to be a “man without qualities” whose natural mode will be the mode of irony (“With me,” said Musil in an interview, “irony is not a gesture of condescension but a form of struggle”)."
-- J.M. Coetzee on Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities
