Who He Is
A young engineer from Hamburg, orphaned of father and mother before the age of seven and, a year and a half later, of his grandfather Hans Lorenz Castorp, raised by his great-uncle Tienappel, who climbs to Davos to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen for three weeks and stays seven years.
The length of the visit is fixed in the very first sentence of the section.He was going on a visit, for three weeks.
He is twenty-two when he arrives in Davos, in Chapter I; the narrator gives his age once, in Chapter II.
The book does not say the age at which he comes down; adding up the seven years, it is about twenty-nine. The number that measures his stay is in the number seven.
The narrator gives his age on arrival in Davos once, at the end of the formation (in Chapter III Hans himself, feverish, miscounts and tells Settembrini that he is in his twenty-fourth year):
When he set out on the journey during which we made his acquaintance, he had not yet completed twenty-three years.He is, therefore, twenty-two.
The narrator defines him less by what he is than by what his era did not give him, and it is this lack that leaves him open to everything the mountain offers.
When this answer is missing, the effect is not confined to the spirit:
To undertake a work that exceeds the measure of pure and simple necessity, when one's time knows no satisfactory answer to the question "For what?", one needs isolation and moral readiness, something rare and of a heroic nature, or else a very robust vitality, and Hans Castorp, the narrator says, possessed neither one nor the other.
Trajectory
In Chapter I: The Arrival at the Berghof he arrives, laughs at what is already routine for Joachim and, in his room, before the first dinner, feels cold in his body and heat in his face.
Still in his room, Hans Castorp describes a contradictory sensation of cold in the body and heat in the face, which Joachim treats as a common effect of the mountain air.I am cold! A horrible cold, at least in the body, for my face is burning!
In Chapter II: The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather the novel returns to childhood: the baptismal font, the two figures of the grandfather, and the three deaths in quick succession that taught him the physical side of death.
The narrator notes that repetition, instead of shattering the boy, produced in him a peculiar detachment:
It was already the third time, in a short span, and at so tender an age, that death acted upon the spirit and the senses, principally the senses, of little Hans Castorp, andthe third burial added a special nuance [...] which immunized him against the frequent fits of crying and against the contagion of the others' tears, so that all of it seemed to him a normal reaction.
In Chapter III: The Whole First Day and the Arrival of Settembrini his body decides before he does, and he refuses Lodovico Settembrini's suggestion to leave the next day.
if I were to abandon my post at once, merely because for a few days I feel a little heat and dizziness, I would be ashamed of myself and would consider myself a coward
In Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer he recognizes in the eyes of Clavdia Chauchat those of Pribislav Hippe, the schoolmate to whom he asked for a pencil at thirteen, buys his own thermometer and hears from Dr. Behrens the diagnosis that changes the meaning of the visit.
I have arrived at the very firm opinion that you were, clandestinely, one of us, and that you would come to realize this, as so many others did who came here for amusement, studied the surroundings with a sneer, and one fine day found out that it would be advisable for them [...] to abandon their attitude of indifferent curiosity and spend an extended stay here, The Thermometer
In Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis, and Walpurgis Night he sees his own hand on the X-ray, studies anatomy alone on winter nights, begins to visit the dying and, on Walpurgis Night, declares himself to Clavdia in French.
Once Joachim's fluoroscopy is over, Behrens lets Hans Castorp contemplate his own hand through the screen, and this is where the chapter reaches its strongest scene.And Hans Castorp saw what he should have expected, but which, in reality, a man is not meant to see, and which he would never have believed he could see: he cast a glance into his own tomb. He saw, anticipated by the force of the rays, the future work of decomposition; he saw the flesh in which he lived, dissolved, annihilated, reduced to an insubstantial mist, amid which stood out the minutely formed skeleton of his right hand, and around the first phalanx of the ring finger hovered, black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed to him [...]. With the eyes of that relative of the Tienappel family, he contemplated a familiar part of his body [...], and for the first time in his life understood that he was destined to die.
At the height of the scene, kneeling before her, Hans Castorp condenses in French the thesis that the whole chapter had been preparing since the X-ray and the anatomy readings.Oh, l'amour, tu sais… Le corps, l'amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu'un. Car le corps, c'est la maladie et la volupté, et c'est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l'amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie! [...] Laisse-moi ressentir l'exhalation de tes pores et tâter ton duvet, image humaine d'eau et d'albumine, destinée pour l'anatomie du tombeau, et laisse-moi périr mes lèvres aux tiennes!
In Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and the Death of Joachim he is caught between Leo Naphta and Settembrini, gets lost in the snowstorm, formulates the sentence that would resolve the duel between the two, and forgets it that same night.
I will not grant death any power over my thoughts! For that is what goodness and philanthropy consist of, and nothing else. [...] Love confronts death; only love, and not reason, is stronger than it.
What he had dreamed was on the verge of fading. And what he had thought, that very same night, he no longer quite understood.
In Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom, and the Thunder he lets himself be fascinated by Pieter Peeperkorn, sinks into boredom, interrupts the session in which Joachim appears and, with the thunder of war, is sent back to the plain by Settembrini.
Hans Castorp neither questions the ghost nor agrees to continue the session:
Forgive me, he murmured to himself [...] Then his eyes overflowed with tears, and his response to Krokowski's request that he address the cousin is to stand up, turn on the ceiling light, and demand the key from him without saying anything more.
And so down [...] down at last! Farewell, my Giovanni! [...] Go and fight with courage, wherever the ties of blood send you!
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that pass through him are Formation, Time, and Illness. On why he yields to the two pedagogues:
Hans Castorp is not seduced by Settembrini or Naphta because he is foolish; he is permeable because his era gave him no answer at all, and a man without an answer accepts any system that offers one. The book is about Europe before 1914 in exactly this sense, and not because it mentions the war at the end.
His arc is the passage from visitor to resident, and the novel marks it with numbers: the three weeks stated in the first dialogue, the seven years announced in the Purpose, the seven minutes of the thermometer. He never decides to leave: he refuses the escape Settembrini suggests in Chapter III, the body decides for him in III and the diagnosis in IV, and in VI he chooses to stay when Joachim leaves. The only descent is not his decision either: it is the thunder.
Relationships
- Joachim Ziemssen: the cousin, who lives the same mountain out of duty and therefore wants to go down.
- Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta: the two pedagogues who dispute his formation.
- Clavdia Chauchat: the passion, tied to Pribislav Hippe through the pencil and the eyes.
- Pieter Peeperkorn: the "personality" that empties the pedagogues' debate.
- Dr. Behrens: the doctor who diagnoses him and shows him the skeleton.
- Symbols connected to him: the thermometer, the Maria Mancini cigars, the X-ray, the snow, the clock, and the pencil.