DESPITE ITS awe-inspiring scale, Musil's novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is a torso. Its first volume, containing 123 chapters, comprising parts 1 and 2, appeared in late 1930. A second volume of equal length was supposed to follow soon. Yet when the second volume appeared at the end of 1932, it contained only the thirty-eight chapters of part 3. Part 4 of the novel never materialized. Nor is it certain that part 4 would have entailed the novel's conclusion, as Musil originally planned. Until the day of his death in April 1942, Musil seems to have been undecided how to conclude the novel. His posthumous papers show numerous related yet inconclusive sketches and drafts, including twenty galley chapters that never made it to press and that the author had begun to revise after 1938. Why Musil — who had signed a contract with a publisher as early as 1922 and publicly discussed the novel's plot and characters in 1926 — was unable to finish the work is much debated among scholars. Many critics are inclined to interpret the novel's unfinished state as a result of its complex genesis and structure rather than to accept it as mere coincidence. For a number of compelling reasons, they find either a symptom of the author's psychological problems or an inadvertent allegory of his style and ideas in the novel's truncation. Some critics view it as an effect of both.

However, incompletion has not prevented the novel's recognition as one of the great books of the twentieth century. Today, The Man Without Qualities ranks among the classics of aesthetic modernism.