Ranier Maria Rilke's I Am Much Too Alone In This World

Ranier Maria Rilke’s “I Am Much Too Alone in This World, yet Not Alone” chronicles a naïve journey of an existential struggle. The speaker, much like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oskar Schell in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, thoroughly contemplates one’s place in the world and the dichotomies which surround oneself in life. The fragility of the speaker’s emotional barriers are mirrored in two uses of the word “enough,” broken off onto their own lines. The tone of the work hinges upon those breaks, much as each development in Oskar’s journey could either bring about closure surrounding his father’s death or worsen Oskar’s grief. The preceding lines of the poem can be analyzed both separately and in conjunction with “enough,” increasing the depth of their meaning. Alone, each line is empowered; they say the speaker is “not small” or “not alone.” Yet with this subsequent addition, the speaker presents a conflicting feeling: that he or she is “not small / enough.” This parallels how Oskar is sometimes confident in his abilities yet at other times feels insignificant.
He is fickle—desiring to either know everything or know nothing about the circumstances surrounding his father’s death. His journey to find the lock represents the part of Oskar that desires to know everything, as mirrored in the line “I want [my free will] accompanying / the path which leads to action.” Oskar wishes, like the speaker of Rilke’s poem, “to be among those in the know, / or else be alone.” The journey to find the lock becomes one of Oskar’s raisons d’être. If he cannot solve the mystery which he believes his father set for him, he may as well be alone because to Oskar, solving the mystery would place him theoretically the closest to his father he will ever be again. Solving it would—in Oskar’s mind—ease the pain of losing his