the other shore

How good it would be, [Robert Musil] suggests, if one could find in life the simplicity inherent in narrative order. This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: "When that had happened, then this happened." What puts our mind at rest is the simple sequence, the overwhelming variegation of life now represented in, as a mathematician would say, a unidimensional order. We like the illusions of this sequence, its acceptable appearance of casuality: "It has the look of necessity." But the look is illusory; Musil's hero Ulrich has "lost this elementary narrative element" and so has Musil. The Man Without Qualities is multidimentional, fragmentary, without the possibility of a narrative end. Why could he not have this narrative order? Because "everything has now become non-narrative." The illusion would be too gross and absurd. 

-frank kermode, The sense of an ending