Between 1911 and 1937 Musil regularly published essays in some of the leading magazines and literary journals in German. The analysis of this set of texts allows us to recognize in the path of the writer not only the transformation of his thought but the expansion of the idea of the essay from a literary model to a paradigm for action. This process matured in the 1920s, when he began to write The Man without Qualities, in which the impasses of modernity are staged through characters, tangled in particular circumstances. There is, however, no way out, no solution. Taking the essay position seriously means, after all, living in accordance with this incompleteness. Musil, the author who was once among the most promising of his generation, dies forgotten in exile, writing a book that could never have an end. Combining the reading of the biographical experience with the idea of aspiration, the idea of the thesis is to propose the failure as a key of reading of the essayist work of the writer.