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Part 4, Chapter 1: A Necessary Purchase
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’s blankets have arrived by the time he and Joachim return from dinner. Joachim tells him how to wrap the blankets around himself the way everyone at the sanatorium does. Hans struggles with the task but eventually manages with Joachim’s help. Still, he’s freezing—and also burning up at the same time. As Hans sits in his room, swaddled in blankets and reclining in his almost magically comfortable lounge chair, he mentally works through the rest of the day’s activities and realizes he’s completely adjusted to the daily schedule here. The narration contemplates the concept of time and of boredom, noting the false ideas people have about boredom. A lot of people think that filling time with “things” will make it pass faster, but this isn’t necessarily true. What people are talking about when they talk about boredom is really monotony.
That Hans can’t yet swaddle himself in the blankets as adeptly as Joachim, a long-time Berghof resident, shows that he’s still somewhat hesitant to fully accept the Berghof and the different way of life it presents. Nevertheless, the genuine pleasure Hans feels at being swaddled in blankets and reclining in his wonderfully comfy lounge chair suggests that the more time passes, the more acclimated Hans will become to the Berghof. The narrator’s philosophical musings about time reinforce the subjective and malleable nature of time as one of the novel’s core themes.
Themes
The narrator says they’ve included this tangent because Hans, himself, was thinking along similar lines. Later, Hans remarks to Joachim about how strange it is that time seems to pass so slowly when one is in a new place. It seems he’s been at the sanatorium for ages, but in reality he’s only been there several days.
The narrator’s (and Hans’s) emphasis on how slowly time passes when one is in a new place seems to foreshadow an impending shift: as Hans becomes more acclimated to the Berghof, it’s likely that time will start to pass more rapidly.
Themes
