Plays and Stories

Lieutenant Gustl is one of the great Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler's most accomplished novels. Written entirely in the form of an interior monologue -- the book highly influenced James Joyce in Ulysses -- the novel recounts the moment-to-moment experiences of a swaggering Austrian military man. In a cloakroom argument after a comment, a baker, reacting to Gustl's rudeness, grabs the soldier's sword and orders him to have patience. Convinced he has been completely dishonored, Gustl ponders suicide and wanders through Vienna wishing for the baker's death. When he learns that the baker has, in fact, died that evening from a stroke, he immediately returns to his aggressive and hateful nature, and relishes a duel he had entered into days before.