Desire and Delusion Book

This collection of three novellas spans Schnitzler's career from 1892-1931 and includes Flight into Darkness, Dying, and Fräulein Else, which above all are psychological studies of'respectively'madness, death, and disgrace/suicide. In other words, it is a rather morbid collection; in fact, I put it down several times because, with the anxiety produced by the recent COVID-19 outbreak, there was only so much talk about death and madness that I could take. Nevertheless, I eventually finished the novellas. What struck me most of all, aside from the at times brilliant psychological realism, was just how modern a writer Schnitzler was. His use of literary techniques like point of view, interior monologue, and stream-of-consciousness is ahead of his time. As Margret Schaefer notes in the introduction, Schitzler's 1900 story Lieutenant Gustl, a vivid inner portrait, was already "path-breaking'it was the first systematic use of the stream-of-consciousness technique in European literature, twenty years before Joyce and Woolf used it." The novellas in Desire and Delusion> are further evidence of the masterful way in which Schnitzler puts this technique to use to get inside of the minds of his characters to reveal their innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.