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If one seeks to satisfy his desire diligently and ambitiously, and if he goes a step farther anytime it is attained, one could lose himself. This seems to be the message of Robert Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless  (Penguin Classics, 2001 (FP: 1906) translation by Shaun Whiteside; 160). Musil's story is about sexual repression, oppression and its covert expression. It is the sexual expression of power and the depression that results when it is repressed. Though published in the early twentieth century, Musil discusses several of today's sexual roles and identities: gender trap, homosexuality, and sadism. The latter is talked about with regards to the power it affords the oppressor. Torless is in a boarding house for boys. He is developing sexually and is bothered by thoughts of sex and his sexuality. As these ideas and thoughts inundate him, he is forced to seek refuge from every possible source but her parents, whose faces he could no longer conjure no matter ...

For early in the development of every fine moral force there is such a point, when the soul weakens, and that will perhaps be its boldest moment - as though it must first put down searching roots in order to churn up the earth destined later to support it - which is why adolescent boys with great futures ahead of them possess a past rich in humiliations. [24-5] If Bozena had been pure and beautiful, and if he had been capable of love in those days, he might have bitten her, heightening both her lust and his own to the point of pain. For the first passion of the adolescent boy is not love of one, but hatred for all. That sense of being misunderstood, of not understanding the world, not only goes hand in hand with the first passion, but is also its only non-arbitrary cause. And it too is a form of flight, in which two people's togetherness means only the duplication of their solitude. [31] Almost every first passion lasts only a short while and leaves a bitter aftertaste. It...