225
See also: Jane Eyre 128–31 ■ David Copperfield 153 ■ Little Women 199 ■ A Sentimental Education 199 ■ Death in
Ven ice 240 ■ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 241 ■ To Kill a Mockingbird 272–73 ■ Midnight’s Children 300–05Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship in 1795–96. It
contains all of the key ingredients,
being the story of a young artist’s
formation, or Bildung: his struggle
to find expression and happiness,
and his eventual acceptance of
his place in society. Over the
succeeding decades and then
centuries, many other great writers
felt a desire to tell a story roughly
similar to their own: in France,
Gustave Flaubert published A
Sentimental Education; in England,
Charles Dickens wrote David
Copperfield; and the Irish writer
James Joyce offered A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man. The
genre’s influence spread across
Europe and then the world.Inspired by sickness
The Magic Mountain had its
beginnings in Thomas Mann’s
visit to a high-altitude sanatorium
in Davos, Switzerland, in 1912,
where his wife was recovering
from a lung infection. It was at
first intended to be a slim volume
to accompany the novella Deathin Ven ice, which he had published
that year. However, it expanded in
the telling, since, with the outbreak
of World War I in 1914, Mann
became very aware that the world
he was describing was coming to a
sudden and violent end. His views
on both nationalism and bourgeois
society were greatly changed by
the conflict, in which he saw the
values of so-called civilization
driving society blindly toward mass
death and destruction. The novel
had thus taken on greater
significance, and continued to growin size. After the war Mann revised
the text for many years, eventually
publishing the novel in 1924, when
it was hailed as a masterpiece.
The Magic Mountain tells the
story of a young man called Hans
Castorp, who goes to the Swiss
Alps to visit his cousin Joachim in
a sanatorium (a hospital dedicated
to the treatment of people who have
a chronic illness, often tuberculosis)
called the Berghof. Hans has good
prospects, and is about to take
a job in the shipbuilding industry.
With its clear air, spectacular
surroundings, few visitors, and
quiet, peaceful atmosphere, the
hospital exists in its own small,
enclosed world. Once he is there,
Castorp himself begins to display
symptoms of tuberculosis, and
is persuaded to stay until he has
recovered. He ends up remaining
in the sanatorium for seven years. ❯❯BREAKING WITH TRADITION
The “magic mountain” on which
the Berghof is located is a symbol of
the sanatorium’s metaphorical distance
from the rest of the world: a secluded
place where even time flows differently.All interest in disease and
death is only really another
expression of interest in life.
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