Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe narrates the gradual erosion of a human being caught between hope, duty, waiting, and death. This article aims to explain the mechanisms of negative resistance in the novel; a tragic form of endurance that does not lead to external victory, yet exposes the logic of the military institution, the myth of glory, and the consumption of human life in expectation of an imaginary event. The study employs directed qualitative content analysis and draws on Georg Lukács’s sociology of the novel, especially the concepts of reification, totality, historicity, and the problematic hero. The units of analysis are meaningful scenes and narrative passages. The findings show that Fort Bastiani is not merely the setting of the story, but an institutional totality that organizes time, body, gaze, desire, and imagination. The absent enemy stabilizes the order of the fort, while waiting empties Drogo’s life of its present. Thus, The Tartar Steppe is not an anti-resistance narrative, but a social anti-epic about the failure of heroic promise and the possibility of critical awareness within defeat.