The Magic Mountain: Part 3, Chapter 9: Satana Makes Shameful Suggestions Summary & Analysis

Hans eventually drifts off, waking up a little past 3:00 p.m. Joachim drops by his room, and the two of them go downstairs for their afternoon snack. Hans asks if Joachim heard Herr Albin’s outburst. Joachim did, and now he complains about the man’s disruptiveness and how it’s setting everyone back in their healing. When Hans asks if Herr Albin would really shoot himself, Joachim nods—people kill themselves quite often here. Disturbed, Hans decides he might want to leave sooner than later. Joachim thinks Hans ought to give the place a bit more time.

Hans and Joachim join the other residents in the dining hall for tea and snacks. Later, after another rest cure, they return for a fifth time, for supper. This meal is no less elaborate than the one that came before. Hans orders a beer but becomes too exhausted to finish it. In agony, he listens to insufferable Frau Stöhr blabber on about the many different fish sauces she can make.  

After supper, most of the residents gather in the lobby and split off into various “social rooms” to hang out before bed. In one room, Hans spots a group gathered around Madame Chauchat. Seeing the rude woman fills Hans with disgust. Settembrini approaches Hans and asks how he’s feeling and how he spent his first day at the sanatorium. Hans tells him his day was like that of a typical resident, spent “in the ‘horizontal fashion,’” to use Settembrini’s term. He says he found the experience distracting but boring at the same time. He also describes the odd sensation he’s had of having “grown older and wiser” over the one day he’s been here.

Hans is about to excuse himself but pauses and asks Settembrini if at supper Frau Stöhr had really been bragging about all the fish sauces she can make, or if Hans imagined the exchange. Settembrini says he has no idea what Hans is talking about. He asks Hans if he’d like to leave this place first thing in the morning, since staying here obviously hasn’t been good for him. Hans, alarmed, says he’s only just gotten there and can’t possibly know how he likes it so early on. Settembrini approves of Hans’s logic—he loves good logic. And he’s seen lots of people experience successful “acclimatization.” He recalls one woman who grew to love it here so much that she refused to leave, even after she was fully healed, and tried to fake a fever in order to stay.

Hans and Joachim head to Joachim’s room after the social hour ends. Hans watches Joachim wrap himself in blankets so he can stay warm while he lies out on the balcony during his rest cure. He marvels at Joachim’s skill at swaddling himself in the blankets. Joachim says it just takes practice, and Hans will learn it too. Hans declines. He won’t lie out on the balcony overnight, as that would be too close to something a resident would do. Then, feeling suddenly rather chilled, Hans bids Joachim goodnight and heads back to his own room.

Hans goes through the motions of getting ready for bed. He thought he would fall right asleep, but now he finds that his heart is pounding too loudly for him to sleep. He gets out of bed and takes a lamp outside to the balcony and lies there on his back. He thinks about Joachim’s unhappy expression when he mentioned Marusya, particularly her physical features, and realizes Joachim must have a crush on her. Next door, the rude Russian couple keep Hans awake with their sexual activities. Eventually he does fall asleep, but he has dreams that are even more disturbing than the night before. In tonight’s dream, Behrens approaches Hans and commands that Hans do “a few spiffing years of service with us up here.” 

Then the dream moves on, and Hans is in a schoolyard. He’s about to ask Madame Chauchat to borrow a pencil when he realizes who she reminds him of. He wakes up, determined to remember this revelation in the morning. Then he drifts back to sleep and dreams of Dr. Krokowski waiting to ambush him to “subject[] his psyche to dissection.” Hans, terrified, flees from the doctor. He wakes up in a cold sweat. In his final dream, he tries to knock over Settembrini but finds he cannot. At that point, Hans has a breakthrough about the meaning of time: it’s just “a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating.” He vows to pass along this knowledge to Joachim in the morning. 

As the night goes on, Hans dreams some more. He has one dream twice. In it, he’s sitting in the dining hall when Madame Chauchat arrives, wearing a white sweater, one hand in her pocket and the other behind her head. She holds out her palm, oddly, for Hans to kiss. He does so, noting her gross, ungroomed nails. In that moment, he feels the same pleasant sensation of being free from honor that he felt when he listened to Herr Albin earlier that day.