“EINE KLEINE STATION AN DER STRECKE, welche nach Rußland führt” (T, 7; It was a small station on the long railroad to Russia, YT, 1). The first sentence of Robert Musil's first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (translated as Young Törless, but literally The Confusions of the Boarding Student Törless, 1906), opens up a vista to the East, which, although literally unexplored within the diegesis, nevertheless suggests a thematic trajectory for the work and for the following reading of it. In the early twentieth century German-speaking Central Europe often consigned Russia to Asia rather than Europe, and thereby to what it often perceived as oriental barbarism rather than occidental civilization. However, Musil's opening motif of the track that traverses several borders on its way to Russia creates a continuum between East and West that undermines this traditional orientalist dichotomy. Although this eastern route represents the railroad less traveled by critics, it is my thesis that orientalist preconceptions, whether evident in the attitudes of the schoolboy protagonist and his classmates toward the local “Eastern” Slavs, or in the supposedly Indian philosophy espoused by his peer Beineberg, are of vital significance to the novel as a whole. In this chapter I will demonstrate that by applying a postcolonial reading to the orientalist motifs, associations, and discourses portrayed in the novel we can begin to understand the global ramifications of one Austrian adolescent's internal confusion.