Where disease appears as the prerequisite of spiritual growth, Mann plays his favorite theme of the polarity between spirit and life the transcendence of this polarity in the name of humanism is central to the novel. The Magic Mountain is also a novel about disease, not merely of individuals, but also of a whole age. Reality as it reveals itself to us is antithetical, and he who wants to begin to comprehend it must risk running the gamut from facet to facet of its nature. The simplifications of reality as Hans Castorp encounters them throughout the book are the object of Mann's irony. Almost nobody is really simple or remains so for long if intelligently observed. The characteristic of such a novel is that it focuses not so much on the hero himself but on the course of his education.Įven if read only on this level, the novel soon makes it clear that Mann did not intend for his readers to take the hero's "simplicity" at face value. This novel, published in 1924 after twelve years of intermittent labor, is the story of the self-development of a "simple, young man." Its hero is the hero of a bildungsroman.
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