Who He Is
Dutch colonial, born in Java, coffee planter, who arrives on the same train as Clavdia Chauchat and dominates any circle through his presence, almost never finishing a sentence.
When Clavdia introduces them, the narrator names the effect the Dutchman has: whoever saw himsuddenly knew what a personality was, and even more: became convinced that a personality could not be other than he was.
Trajectory
Hans Castorp tries to explain to Lodovico Settembrini why he lets himself be fascinated by a man whose speech has no content.
To explain this fact, we have only one word: personality [...] personality is, after all, a positive value [...] More positive than stupidity and cleverness. Positive to the highest degree, absolutely positive, just like life itself.
Beside him, the discussion between Settembrini and Leo Naphta loses its force.
There was no more current in the light switch, dead for good [...] In a word: all of them remained absent, and this was, to use Hans's term, nothing less than a mystery.
He elevates wine, food, and sleep to classical gifts of life, makes feeling a religious duty and, knowing of Hans Castorp's past with Clavdia, proposes to him a brotherhood sealed with wine in place of satisfaction by the weapon, which he says he cannot give him because of his age and illness.
His personal theology, spoken to Hans Castorp at the bedside, sums up what is at stake in all its grandeur:
Our feeling [...] is the manly force that awakens life [...] feeling, my young friend, is divine. Man is divine, as long as he feels [...] If man fails in feeling, the ignominy of God breaks out, the defeat of God's manhood takes place, a cosmic catastrophe, an unimaginable horror, and at this point he drinks again.
Wasted by a tropical fever, he kills himself with poison, using an instrument that imitates the fangs of a cobra, made, according to Behrens's guess, at his own suggestion, and which Dr. Behrens takes from the dead man's hands.
The object that Dr. Behrens takes from the dead man's hands is described with technical precision:
made of steel, ivory, gold, and rubber [...] two curved forked teeth, of polished steel [...] the embodiment of a hypodermic syringe [...] the mechanical copy of a cobra's fangs.
His stature was so great [...] that the failure of feeling in the face of life caused him the sensation of a cosmic catastrophe and of the ignominy of God. For you must know, madam, that he considered himself the nuptial organ of God., says Hans Castorp, closing with the same words that Peeperkorn had used to explain himself in life: he dies consistent with the only doctrine he had, that feeling is a duty that admits no failure.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that pass through him are Passion, Meaning of Life, and Death. On his role:
Peeperkorn is the strangest and most decisive piece of the book: the answer to the duel is not a third doctrine, it is a presence. Whoever tries to sum up the novel through the theses of Settembrini and Naphta loses precisely this, and is left with a debate instead of a novel.
The novel does not resolve the duel between Naphta and Settembrini with a third argument; it resolves it with a body. Peeperkorn's presence refutes no thesis, it merely shows that a whole life can be organized around something that is no idea at all, which is, in its own way, an answer to the "For what?" that Hans Castorp had lacked since Chapter II: The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather.
Relationships
- Clavdia Chauchat: the companion with whom he arrives.
- Hans Castorp: whom he calls brother.
- Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta: whose debate he empties without refuting it.