Freedom in The magic mountain

Abstract

Amid the hilly landscape of the Swiss Alps, a sanatorium for respiratory diseases. The many coughs in long treatment do not have more serious commitments than following the usual mealtime and home schedule. Faced with this spatially stagnant and temporally hermetic medium of Thomas Mann’s The magic mountain, freedom is muffled. We do not refer, of course, to the creative freedom of the German author, whose proof of grandeur is the novel itself, neither to the interpretative freedom of the reader, but to freedom –or rather its attenuation– problematized by the characters of this long history. This is the case of the young protagonist Hans Castorp, whose learning about the theme paradoxically occurs at the time of his stay in a place that hijacks his freedom. This is not only because the main character is unable to choose, without constraints, the values that underlie his choices, but also because this is hampered by the anomalous, or, according to the title, “magic” spatio-temporal situation of the mountain. How this problem is presented narratively, by means of some freedom indexes – that is, elements that modify the indeterminacy of the narrative, for the characters and the reader –, is what we want to present.