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A literary criticism on the novel "Landläufiger Tod," by Gerhard Roth is presented. It cites that Roth employed narrative reasoning to capture the reader's consciousness and grasp the difference between reality and imagination. Furthermore, it shows that his theme reveals his interest to discover truth and knowledge while setting the man-against-himself conflict in approaching the idea of life and death. An overview of the storyline is presented.

This article explores the enigma of the character Tonka in Robert Musil's novel Tonka. At the heart of this narrative lies the mystery of Tonka herself. The tile of the work implies that she has central significance, yet the author has made her curiously inaccessible to our understanding by interposing between reader and events a kind of narrator, from whose point of view the story is told. There is no purpose in the narrator's telling the story except to clarify to himself what Tonka may have meant to him, the question which is the central problem of this novel. The most serious impediment to our grasp of Tonka is the imprecision of the narrator's memory.