Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Magic Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time
Coming of Age
Death and Illness
East vs. West
Abstract Ideals vs. Lived Experience
Summary
Analysis
Hans Castorp hardly remembers his parents, who both died in a short span of time when Hans was between five and seven years old. Hans briefly lived with his grandfather, the senator, until the senator also died. Hans’s grandfather’s house was built on the Esplanade. Hans and his grandfather would dine together every day in one of the formal rooms downstairs.
Despite Hans’s seeming discomfort with death, he’s actually had considerable exposure to it, having dealt with the death of his parents as a young boy. Perhaps the shock and horror of this massive loss has in fact made him place more, not less, weight on death.
Themes
After dinner Hans’s grandfather would move to the den, and sometimes Hans would join him in the dimly lit room, occasionally asking to see “the baptismal bowl.” His grandfather would open the china cabinet, which was full of old antiques, and remove a tarnished silver bowl. On the bowl’s underside were a list of names of the bowl’s changing owners. Now, there are seven names. Hans’s grandfather would list off the names to Hans, which included his father, and his father’s father, and so on. Hans would listen, engrossed in the sound of his grandfather’s voice—“that somber sound of the crypt and buried time” and think of religiosity, death, and history. Hans’s grandfather would promise Hans that the bowl would be his in eight years, since the infant Hans was held over it when he was baptized, just as Hans’s father and grandfather had been before him.
Hans’s fascination with the “baptismal bowl” indicates his early fascination with ritual and tradition. He wants to find meaning in symbolic objects and practices. This is, perhaps, similar to the serious attitude toward death he demonstrates later in life: he wants to find some deeper meaning and significance in it, and this attitude makes it difficult for him to understand the nonchalance with which Joachim disregards death and dying.
Themes
Hans’s grandfather was a devout Christian. He held rigid, traditional believes and was suspicious of new ideas, despite coming of age in a time of great change and rebellion. He believed that children (and grandchildren) ought to obey and admire their elders and learn from them. He was a tall, gaunt man who was always impeccably dressed. Hans’s grandfather’s one vice was a penchant for snuff, though even this was “harmless” and simply suggested the “carelessness that age either consciously and merrily permits itself or brings with it.”
This description of Hans’s grandfather gives readers insight into the type of values that were instilled in Hans as a young child: he was brought up to respect tradition and conventional Christian understandings of morality. This, combined with Hans’s grandfather’s seeming distaste for most vices, establishes Hans’s childhood as quite different from the passive, lazy atmosphere he will encounter at the Berghof years later.
Themes
A life-size portrait of Hans’s grandfather hung above the sofa in the parlor, depicting Hans’s grandfather as a town councillor, wearing his official uniform. A respected artist had painted it in the style of the late Middle Ages. Though Hans had only seen his grandfather dressed this way once, in a town parade, he nonetheless regarded the image as his “authentic and real grandfather.” Compared to that image, the “lapses and eccentricities in his everyday appearance were apparently mere imperfections.”
Hans’s high regard for the portrait of his grandfather indicates his respect for order and formality. That he considers this uniformed, official version of his grandfather to be “authentic and real,” meanwhile, reflects his youthful idealism: he views perfection as superior and something to strive for and views the “lapses and eccentricities” that characterize daily life as inferior and flawed.
Themes
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After his grandfather had died and it was time to say goodbye for the last time, seven-year-old Hans gazed into his grandfather’s coffin and was happy to see that his grandfather was dressed in his uniform. He hadn’t seen his grandfather in the late stages of his battle with pneumonia—he had been taken away and spared the sight of his suffering, of the doctors’ comings and goings, and of Fiete’s eyes, red from crying. Though Hans, too, cried for his grandfather, he accepted the situation because his parents’ passings made him accustomed to death.
Despite enduring the deaths of numerous close family members, Hans has had minimal direct exposure to the experience of dying—his elders have hidden it from him, perhaps believing that confronting death in such a direct, blunt way would be too upsetting for such a young child. Thus, although Hans understands and accepts death as an abstract concept, he hasn’t quite experienced what it’s like to watch someone suffer and then die.
Themes
Looking at his grandfather’s corpse, Hans observed that death was both spiritually and emotionally “gripping,” as well as “something very material, physical.” The religious side came through in the flower arrangements and the cross someone had placed in his grandfather’s hands. And the material side—the side the flowers were meant to conceal—came through in the uncanny, waxen appearance of his grandfather’s body. Hans observed that it was a thing in the coffin rather than a person. This aspect of death “is neither beautiful nor sad, but almost indecent in its base physicality.” Just then, a buzzing fly landed on the body’s forehead. Hans detected the faint scent of decay, likening it to the foul body odor of a friendless boy at school.
The disgust with which Hans regards his grandfather’s decaying corpse—he finds it “almost indecent in its base physicality”—hints at Hans’s (perhaps unconscious) refusal to accept death’s inevitability. He finds the corpse “indecent” because it forces him to confront the disturbing yet inevitable fact that his grandfather—and all mortal beings—cannot overcome the limitations of the physical body. Ultimately, all life leads to death and decay, and this is a heavy and troubling fact for anybody—not least of all a young boy—to accept.
Themes
