Goethe's Werther: Double Perspective and the Game of Life

Abstract

The one genuinely enlightening answer to this question, as far as I know, is that suggested by Eric Blackall in Goethe and the Novel. Blackall argues that the significance of the narrator's intrusion resides precisely in its failure to show Werther to us objectively, and in our awareness of this failure. In both versions of the novel, Blackall points out, even after the editor intervenes, the point of view from which the whole fiction is seen is still essentially Werther's. Documents composed by Werther are still a major portion and source of the text; the impossibility of achieving objectivity is prominent as a theme; and most important, the editor relates a number of facts which, at the very least, it is extremely improbable that he could have learned from living witnesses. Especially Werther's solitary broodings while on his way to pick up Lotte, on the day the peasant-boy is apprehended for murder, are something only Werther or an omniscient narrator could know of; but even in the first version, where the peasant-boy is missing, far too many details of the Ossian scene are given, including some which it is entirely unreasonable to imagine as having been supplied by Lotte. The editor, then, is not convincing as a person but is obviously a device for manipulating our perspective; and Blackall suggests that precisely the transparency of this device creates for us a significant double perspective: remain with Werther's point of view and yet see it as a point of view, not as absolute.2 The significance of the change from letters to narrative is that it does not effectively alter our point of view, yet produces a certain irony concerning the point of view we still occupy.