The Magic Mountain

“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; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique.”  

Hans cannot see himself as a representative of his nationality, age, and class, but the narrator can and will use the “unextraordinary” Hans as a symbol of an entire generation sleepwalking into disaster.

“I can tell right off whether someone will make a competent patient or not, because that takes talent, everything takes talent, and this Myrmidon here hasn’t the least talent for it.”

The idea of illness as a skill requiring diligence is a folly of the abstracted thinking typical of Director Behrens who compares the duty-bound Joachim to a Myrmidon, a member of the Thessians who followed Achilles to try. From that derivation, the word has come to mean a follower of a powerful person who carries out orders without question or independent, critical thinking. For Director Behrens, Joachim cannot compare to the best of his “students.”

“‘No,’ Hans Castorp insisted with a ferocity not at all appropriate to the mild objection Joachim had offered. ‘I’ll not let you talk me out of it. A dying man has something nobler about him than your average rascal strolling about, laughing and making money and stuffing his belly. It won’t do.’ And his voice began to waver strangely. ‘It just won’t do to walk up so calm and cool and …’ But not his words were swallowed in a fit of laughter that suddenly overwhelmed him, the same laughter as yesterday, welling up from deep inside—convulsive, unbounded laughter, until he had to close his eyes for the tears.” 

Hans is discussing the nature of illness and death with Joachim, emphasizing a bourgeois romanticism about illness that takes place under conditions of great privilege and comfort. His uncontrollable fit of laughter creates a tension between his earnestness and the substance of his ideas.