The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain is, among many other things, written within the genre constraints of the bildungsroman, or a coming of age novel. It details the growth and development of its central character from youth into adulthood. Yet in the Foreword, the narrator uses the first-person plural (“The story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here…”) when introducing the main character, Hans Castorp (xi). This plurality mirrors the novel’s cast of characters, of which there are dozens. The sanatorium teems a cosmopolitan bunch hailing from every corner of the world. These characters are brilliant or dull, authoritative or meek, sad or happy, representatives of this or that national culture, yet it is important that all these myriad facets of humanity are seen through Hans Castorp’s limited perspective. Hans also represents the plurality of his particular generation with all its faults and attributes: “A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries” (31). The Magic Mountain turns the idea of the bildungsroman on its head, taking on the