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
The narrator laments the difficulty of narrating time. Stories don’t accurately present time—rather, they “fill” it, creating significance and division within it. There’s also not necessarily a correlation between the literal duration of time a story covers and how long the story ends up being—ultimately, a story aims to convey time as one experiences it. In this way, then, this novel both “deal[s]” with time and treats time as “its subject.” Hans’s experience of time changes drastically the longer he remains at the Berghof, and it’s impossible for “principled flatlanders” to understand exactly what he’s going through. Increasingly, he finds it possible to separate the past from the present and future.
The narrator once more distinguishes between the literal passage of time and a person’s subjective experience of time, explaining how The Magic Mountain’s narrative style attempts to mimic a person’s actual experience of time. The opening passage of Part 7 thus reminds readers to consider the critical role time plays in how a person makes sense of their life. Hans’s time at the Berghof results in his diminished ability to register or find meaning in the passing time, and this corresponds with his increasingly weak grip on reality. As he loses his sense of time, he loses his sense of self.
Themes
The narrator describes a situation to which flatlanders might relate: losing one’s sense of time and space when one becomes immersed in a beautiful landscape. This is like what might happen when one goes for a pleasant walk along the beach. In this situation, “you are lost to time and it to you.” One’s mind empties, and one feels completely lost in the moment and at peace.
The scene the narrator describes here is idyllic and positive: it’s likely that many readers can relate to the sense of relief and calm that results from witnessing something beautiful and uncomplicated, like a glorious landscape, and momentarily forgetting all the time-sensitive problems and anxieties that normally consume one’s days.
Themes
Of course, moral people quickly grow bored of such experiences. They know that in order to honor and give meaning to life, one must return to one’s duties. Joachim knew this, but he was a “zealot” about it, and that’s perhaps why he died. The narrator, giving Hans the benefit of the doubt, suggests that perhaps Hans recognized that Joachim’s rigid commitment to duty was what killed him, and so he tried to go about things differently. Perhaps this is what motivated Hans in “his disgraceful management of time, his wicked dawdling with eternity[.]”
Here, the narrator presents Hans and Joachim as embodying opposite ends of a spectrum of time management, with Joachim’s careful time management at one end and Hans’s “disgraceful management of time” at the other. The narrator suggests, somewhat ironically, that Joachim’s careful time management—his eagerness to return to his military service at the cost of his health—was his downfall and that this justifies Hans’s choice to stay at the Berghof and remain aimless.
Themes
