Walser's robber is an outsider who does not succeed in "snuggling up well-behavedly to the bourgeois order". He is a contemporary who lacks the decisive "what is important for life and his comfort". He is the "good-for-nothing" who feels forced into the role of a "robber", because he has no money or knows how to arrange and earn it in a generally respected way. Although he never commits a criminal act, he provokes the majority of the conformists who feel irritated and insecure just by his mere existence.