Time and Death: Heidegger’s Temporality in The Magic Mountain

Abstract

Time, is a classical motif both in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Heidegger’s ontology. Reading The Magic Mountain in terms of Heidegger’s ontology helps us generate a totality view of temporality in Heidegger’s sense and a fresh approach to interpreting the age-old discussion in the novel. This essay attempts to offer up Heidegger’s ontology on time and death as a way of revisiting the classical motif — the meaning of time that illuminated in Thomas Mann’s narrative experiment, the Zeitroman or time novel. The novel’s portrayal of death makes it possible for Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the novel, to understand ‘authentic temporality’ what Heidegger calls ‘the meaning of the Being’. In this sense, the bewitchment of the magic mountain lies in the magic of time and death. Castorp’s closeness to death enables him to understand death in the authentic way, which is in Heidegger’s words, ‘enter into death advance’ or ‘Being-towards-death’ and experience a ‘free and pristine’ state, as Mann puts it. By extension, the experience of Castorp provides readers a perspective of apprehending Heidegger’s ‘Dasein’ and ‘authenticity’. Dasein or Castorp is not Being only to grow to well understand himself or live a new life under the influence of illness and death as many protagonists in conventional Bildungsroman, but Being that understands himself in terms of his Being-experiencing time’s authentic temporality in authentic ‘Being-a-whole’ through ‘Being-towards-death’.