Who He Is
Hans Castorp's paternal grandfather, a senator in Hamburg, in whose house the grandson, orphaned of father and mother, lived for a year and a half. He appeared to the boy in two forms: the everyday grandfather and the full-length portrait in the room, with the Spanish ruff and the robes of an old alderman, and only the second was valid as true.
For the child, and later for the memory of the adult, it was the second image that counted as authentic, and the first was reduced to an incomplete approximation of it:
for the seven-year-old boy as well as for the adult's recollection, the everyday and familiar image of the old man did not constitute the genuine and true one.
Trajectory
In Chapter II: The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather he shows his grandson, at the boy's request, the family's baptismal font, a silver basin on an older tray, on the reverse of which are the names of the seven heads of family who owned it, and each time repeats over it the account of three baptisms.
Hearing the grandfather recite the names, the boy felt something that the narrator describes as an almost physical effect, the sound of the accumulated genealogical prefixes resounding as if coming from a submerged world:
these "bis, tris, tetra," dark sounds of tombs and buried times, which nonetheless expressed a bond, piously maintained, between the present, his own life, and that submerged world.
The grandfather himself repeated each time, over the same basin, the account of three baptisms, that of Hans, that of his father, and that of the grandfather himself, each with the water falling into the same golden hollow, and it is before this identical repetition that the narrator names for the first time the central feeling of the chapter,the strange impression, half dreamy and half anguished, of something that paraded without moving, that changed and yet remained, something that was as much reiteration as dizzying monotony.
In the same chapter he dies of pneumonia and lies in state in the dining room, again with the Spanish ruff and the ivory crucifix between his hands. It is the third death the grandson sees in a short span of time, after the mother and the father, who died when he was between five and seven.
Thus the boy inwardly approved that the grandfather should appear in full authenticity and perfection on the day when the hour came to bid him farewell forever, because in deaththe grandfather, solemnly released from that passing adaptation, had assumed in full his genuine and deserved aspect.
From this third death the narrator draws the formulation with which he sums up the double face of death in the whole novel:
death had two aspects, one pious, meaningful, of melancholy beauty [...] and at the same time had another, absolutely different and even opposite, a very physical, quite material aspect, which it was impossible to call beautiful, meaningful, pious, or even sad.
In Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer the grandfather returns by two paths: his tic, the head tremor, stays with Hans Castorp after the solitary walk and comes over him at table, where he waits, startled, for the crash of the glass door that announces Clavdia Chauchat; and, when Lodovico Settembrini tells of the grandfather Giuseppe, a Carbonaro dressed in black in mourning for the homeland, Hans Castorp compares him to his own grandfather, who was also always in black, for an opposite reason.
Certainly, these are two worlds, two cardinal points, Dawning Dread. Of the Two Grandfathers and the Boat Ride at Dusk
The baptismal basin that returns here to Hans Castorp's memory was presented in Chapter II: The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather, and it is against this image of piety and the past that Settembrini measures the rebellious grandfather who turned toward progress.
In Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis, and Walpurgis Night the signet ring that he bequeathed to the grandson appears in the fluoroscopy, black and loose around the bone of Hans Castorp's ring finger.
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.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that pass through him are Death, Time, and Tradition and Modernity. On what the baptismal font installs in the novel:
This double sensation, time as a succession that at the same time changes nothing, is born from a family object, not from a philosophical argument, and it is this same experience, transferred to the sanatorium, that will reappear treated directly in Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer.
After Chapter II, the grandfather returns only through objects and gestures: the basin recalled in IV, the head tremor inherited by the grandson, the signet ring on the radiographed hand in V. Chapter II says that the boy recognized the grandfather's true form in the dead man; in V, the grandfather's ring appears at the moment when Hans Castorp understands for the first time that he is destined to die.
Relationships
- Hans Castorp: the grandson who lived with him, inherited the signet ring and the head tremor.
- Lodovico Settembrini: whose grandfather Giuseppe, the Carbonaro, is measured against him in Chapter IV.
- Consul Tienappel, great-uncle on the maternal side, who takes the boy in after his death.
- Symbol connected to him: the X-ray, where the signet ring appears.