1. What has Joachim’s delight about his cousin’s arrival at the Berghof in common with his unusual reason for liking music? 2. What is the principal function of the sections “Of the Christening Basin” and “At Tienappels”? 3. During their first encounter, Settembrini compares Castorp to Odysseus. What does this […]
Read more Study Help Essay QuestionsCritical Essays On the Medical Aspects of The Magic Mountain
The publication of The Magic Mountain caused something of a stir, not only among writers, but also among doctors. Many of them took the novel to be an attack on medical conditions at Davos or at sanatoriums in general. Some went so far as to set up lists of the […]
Read more Critical Essays On the Medical Aspects of The Magic MountainCritical Essays The East the West and Germany
Thomas Mann has been called reactionary (because of his long hesitancy to embrace Western democracy as the panacea of Germany’s problems prior to and immediately after World War I); he has been called chauvinistic (because he saw the historical role of Germany to be that of the great mediator between […]
Read more Critical Essays The East the West and GermanyCritical Essays Influences on Thomas Mann
Johann Wolfgang Goethe According to Mann’s own words, the life, thought, and works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) influenced him considerably. Death in Venice was originally conceived to deal with Goethe’s life; the tetralogy of Joseph and His Brothers is full of allusions to his life and his nineteenth-century visions […]
Read more Critical Essays Influences on Thomas MannCritical Essays Technique and Style in The Magic Mountain
On the highest level, The Magic Mountain tries to convey the experience of time by narrating it. This determines its technique and style. The plot does not move from beginning to end in the conventional and reportorial sense because it is the correlative, not of the hero’s story, but of […]
Read more Critical Essays Technique and Style in The Magic MountainCritical Essays The Bildungsroman
As opposed to the social novel, a bildungsroman (a novel of education or a novel of educational formation) focuses on its hero’s education toward a meaningful idea of himself and his role in the world. Other characters are clearly subordinated to this process, often to the extent of being assigned […]
Read more Critical Essays The BildungsromanThomas Mann Biography
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 into a highly respected merchant family in the medieval town of Lubeck on the North Sea. He was the second of five children of Senator Thomas Heinrich Mann and his musically talented wife. It was through his mother and the many musicians frequenting their […]
Read more Thomas Mann BiographyCharacter Analysis Hofrat Behrens
The key to an understanding of the head doctor is the name Rhadamanthus, which is the clear-sighted Settembrini’s term for him. Rhadamanthus and Minos (Dr. Krokowski is called Minos), in Greek mythology, are the two sons of Zeus and Europa who preside over the realm of the dead. Behrens presides […]
Read more Character Analysis Hofrat BehrensCharacter Analysis Mynheer Peeperkorn
The Dutchman’s traits fit Mann’s concept of the “Eastern” man. He is non-intellectual, mysterious, sensual, incoherent, and tyrannical. His forceful personality succeeds in regrouping the patients at the Berghof into those who are aware of the spell he casts on them and try to resist and those who surrender to […]
Read more Character Analysis Mynheer PeeperkornCharacter Analysis Leo Naphta
Mann sketches his characters by pitting them against each other rather than by describing them directly. Naphta is characterized in terms of his intellectual adversary Settembrini. Naphta’s intellectual prowess matches that of the Italian, but his cast of mind is essentially irrational. Whereas in Settembrini’s view death is but the […]
Read more Character Analysis Leo Naphta