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Part 2, Chapter 2: At the Tienappels’/Hans Castorp’s Moral State
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
Back in the present, Hans wakes up early and takes his time getting ready. He laughs, remembering his ridiculous dream the night before. It’s a beautiful day, and he hears music playing somewhere in the distance. Hans loves music, and he feels calm and pleasant as he listens to it now.
Hans’s cheery and lighthearted disposition this morning is a far cry from the exhaustion and anxiety he felt the night before. The ease with which his mood shifts illustrates his impressionable, malleable nature.
Themes
Hans walks out onto his balcony and hears the noisy Russian couple next door, their “Giggles, gasps, grapplings.” It’s clear the couple is having sex, but naïve—or perhaps willfully ignorant—Hans thinks perhaps that there’s some innocent explanation for the noises. A darkness washes over Hans’s face as he wills himself not to understand what he knows he’s hearing.
Not only does Hans come across as pitifully naïve in this scene, but he also reveals himself to be rather unyielding and judgmental: he believes there is something obscene or inconsiderate about his neighbors’ noisy intimacy, and he judges them harshly for not behaving according to his bourgeois standards of respectability.
Themes
Disgusted, Hans returns to his room to stop hearing the noises from next door, but he’s dismayed to find that they’re even louder indoors. Angrily, he observes the cheaply constructed, too-thin walls of his room. Hans has no good feelings toward the Russian couple and grunts something rude about them under his breath. By the time Joachim arrives to fetch Hans for supper, Hans looks woefully underslept.
The noisy Russian couple’s loud intimacy is further evidence that the Berghof exists apart from the rest of the world: in polite society, it would be rude to wake up one’s neighbors in this way, but at the Berghof, this particular social norm (and perhaps others, too) don’t seem to matter all that much.
Themes
