Themes

Time the subject and also the form of the novel, in the Excursus in Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer. Formation the young man without an answer whom the mountain shapes and who forgets what he has learned, in Chapter II: The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather. Death from the grandfather's death in childhood to Joachim's, in Chapter II: The Baptismal Font and the Two Figures of the Grandfather and Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and the Death of Joachim. Illness the sanatorium as a world and the diagnosis that holds back whoever came up healthy, in Chapter I: The Arrival at the Berghof and in the thermometer of Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe, and the Thermometer. Reason Settembrini and humanism against the authority of Naphta, in Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and the Death of Joachim. Passion Clavdia Chauchat and Walpurgis Night, in Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis, and Walpurgis Night. The Meaning of Life the sentence from the Snow, spoken and forgotten, and the descent into war, in Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and the Death of Joachim and Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom, and the Thunder.