The Nature of Time

One thing that we've discussed in class about Beloved that sort of reminded me of a theme from my independent study book, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, is the consideration of time. In Beloved, the idea of the past and whether we ever really move on from it is discussed by Sethe, particularly related to her experiences at Sweet Home that continually haunt her. In a slightly different but related way, time is considered by Mann in The Magic Mountain. In the novel, an engineer named Hans Castorp goes to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin, who has tuberculosis, for a 3 week long stay, but ends up staying on the mountain for 7 years. Mann discusses time a lot in the novel, particularly how time can seem to slip by quickly for long periods of time when life is routine and monotonous. Mann achieves this very clearly in the novel by having the first 3 weeks of Hans' visit take up probably about a third of the book (about 200 pages), the rest of his first year at the sanatorium take up the next large portion, and the 6 following years taking up probably less time than these other sections. Additionally, during Hans' stay he becomes increasingly separated from his former life in his home country as he is separated from his family and former life. I think it's interesting to see how these differing considerations and conceptions of time are explored in the two novels, as the nature of time and the past really is a sort of mysterious aspect of human existence.