A Montanha Mágica como paródia do gênero romance de formação: o estilo irônico de Thomas Mann

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, from the perspective of the genre Bildungsroman. Despite sharing characteristics with the genre, the work presents itself through irony and satire, as a parody. Thomas Mann's classic follows the tradition of the genre by presenting the story of a young engineer named Hans Castorp, who travels to the Berghof sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, to visit his cousin Joachim, who is hospitalized with tuberculosis, and ends up becoming himself, a patient there. Hence, his stay is prolonged and during the period he spends in the Alps – seven years – he has a vast experience of learning at different levels of intellectual knowledge and classical humanistic Bildung [education]. However, the appropriation of the Bildungsroman genre by Thomas Mann when conceiving The Magic Mountain takes place in a historical and literary context that allows for the production of a work with an ironic content, which subverts the classic genre, and functions, in this sense, as a parody. The resource of irony becomes, therefore, of great importance for the meaning of the novel, because, in addition to being situated in the pessimistic and troubled context in which the First World War broke out, irony dominates Hans Castorp's story and reformulates the conception of his Bildung and learning, transforming the classic overcoming of the character of this type of novel into a tragic and unproductive failure – pedagogical only as an example for the reader. In his learning, Hans Castorp deals with issues related to human existence, such as life, death, love and illness, but everything only as an experience and with a reckless attitude that awakens, in the young man, sympathy for death, while his main tutor, Settembrini, seeks to distance him from this place and tries to teach him the value of life. All of this takes place in the nebulous environment of the Berghof sanatorium, where the disease reigns supreme and this is represented and narrated in an ironic and banal way, even forcing the characters to choose to resist or acclimatize to the mountain. In this context, the clashes between the different pedagogical powers that affect Hans Castorp and between the dyad of life and death are materialized in the young person's experience in an ironic way, not only through the reformulation of the classic genre, but also through the ironic system structured in the narrative and stylistic resources that constitute the novel