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Part 11, Chapter 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Buddenbrooks, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Family and Sacrifice
Tradition, Modernity, and Change
The Protestant Ethic
Personal Fulfillment and Self-Knowledge
Pretense and Etiquette
Summary
Analysis
An omniscient narrator describes the typical progression of typhus, beginning with the incubation period. At first, the patient “feels depressed and moody”; he loses his appetite as his symptoms worsen. He feels dizzy. This leads to chills and a fever. Red spots soon appear all over the chest and stomach. This lasts for about a week. In the second week, much of the pain goes away, but the dizziness gets worse, and the patient grows increasingly disoriented and delirious. His gums and teeth blacken, and his vital signs worsen.
The narration deliberately describes the typical progression of typhus as it presents in a generic patient, but it’s clear that it is describing the disease’s progression in Hanno Buddenbrook. In retrospect, then, Hanno’s demeanor in the previous chapter—his malaise, his melancholy, his shivering—takes on grave new significance as symptoms of a physical illness as well as a spiritual one.
Active
Themes
Sometimes it’s hard to diagnosis typhus in its early stages, particularly if the patient is usually apathetic and melancholy—and if the patient’s family “pins all its hopes” and dreams on the success and prosperity of the patient. But what happens when the patient’s symptoms worsen? Surely a competent doctor—someone like Dr. Langhals, for example—could make a proper diagnosis. The doctor could instruct the family to give the patient a specific medicine and to ensure that his room is well-ventilated and clean. But in the end, whether these remedies work is up to chance.
The narration’s mention of Dr. Langhals further cements Hanno as the generic patient described in this chapter, as does its description of the hypothetical patient’s family “pin[ning] all its hopes” on the patient. The narrative choice to describe Hanno’s illness in generic terms gives the chapter a distant, unfeeling feel—it’s driving home the reality that Hanno Buddenbrook is nothing special, neither in life nor in death. He, like anyone else, will die and be lost to the ravages of time.
Active
Themes
Finally, the patient is overcome by “feverish dreams.” He hears a happy voice telling him to return to a place of “cooling shade and peace.” He feels overwhelmed with “a sense of duties neglected, a sense of shame, of renewed energy, of courage, joy, and love, a feeling that he still belongs to that curious, colorful, and brutal hubbub that he has left behind.” In the end, though, the patient knows that “he will die.”
Active
Themes
