In the Forward, the narrator informs us that The Magic Mountain “is not to be measured in days, nor the burden of age weighing upon it to be counted by orbits around the sun; in a word, it does not actually owe its pastness to time...” (xi). The subject of time and its malleability is at the forefront of the author’s (and of Hans’s) mind. Time can go by very slowly, as on Hans’s first day in the sanatorium (which takes up Parts One through Three), or it can rush past in years, as in the final chapter. Time becomes precious to those with a lust for and purpose in life, with each lost minute becoming a small tragedy, or it can be mercilessly annihilated in bulk by those who have become bored with their lives. Such is the power of the perceiving mind that time bends to its will, just as it bends around gravitational pull (as Einstein established in his Theory of Relativity, published in 1916).

If the mind can passively perform these tricks with time, what might a thinking novelist do, working at the best of his ability? This was an incidental question to writers before the rise of Modernist literary aesthetic, when the novel was an indifferent vehicle for “beautiful feelings,” as Hans puts it early on.