Balancing The Account: Thomas Mann’s Unordnung und Frües Leid

This article seeks to elucidate the various narrative strategies which Thomas Mann adopts to achieve the desired balance between sympathy and critical objectivity in the reader’s response to the central character of his story Unordnung und frühes Leid. Making due allowance for the degree of ambiguity created by an irony whose source and direction can rarely be identified with certainty, it assesses the significance of the narrator’s pervasive adoption of Professor Cornelius’s perspective (and its occasional interruptions); it considers the rhetorical function of the title and its problematic relation to the totality of what is presented; it shows how the narrator’s persistent use of the present tense implicitly subverts the professor’s conservative view of history; and in structural terms it argues not only that the low level of narrativity of the story as a whole contradicts his attempt to subject life to historical coherence, but also that contrasting blocks of material juxtaposed with his lofty historical reflections serve to question the value of these reflections by calling attention to the remoteness and evasion they represent.