What It Is
The snowstorm in the section "Snow," in Chapter VI, in which Hans Castorp goes out on skis against the rules, gets lost, falls asleep standing beside a shed, and dreams. Back in Chapter IV, an off-season snowfall had forced him to buy blankets.
Where It Appears
Before the storm, Hans Castorp stops in front of the snowflakes.
Examining the flakes on his sleeve with the eyes of an amateur naturalist, who had already seen them under the lens, he notices the hostile perfection of their design:
they were too regular, to a degree never reached by substance organized for life. To the latter, such exact precision was repugnant, seeming to it deadly, like the mystery of death itself.
Out of the dream comes the formulation that resolves, from above, the duel of the pedagogues, and on that same night it begins to fade.
I do not wish to 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 point of fading away. And what he had thought that same night he no longer understood very well.
What It Means
The novel grants Hans Castorp, and only him, the formulation that Naphta and Settembrini spend the whole chapter without reaching, and in the same gesture takes from him the conscious possession of it: the central truth of the book is spoken and forgotten by the same person, in the same scene, which perhaps explains why the duel between the two pedagogues goes on, without a winner, until Joachim's death.
Snow is the perfection that kills: the flakes, too regular, which the text brings close to the mystery of death, and the storm that nearly carries off Hans Castorp are the setting in which he arrives at the phrase against the power of death. It is the only place in the novel where the answer appears, and it is outside the Berghof, alone and lost.
Relationships
- Core themes: Death, Meaning of Life, Nature and Civilization.
- Characters: Hans Castorp, Leo Naphta, Lodovico Settembrini.