Unreliable Narration

First, Zeitblom presents himself as a member of the so-called “inner emigration” who has withdrawn from society under the Nazi regime and now lives in quiet but morally upright resistance to the ruling order. He even tells us how politics have driven a wedge between him and his two sons, who are both loyal servants of the Third Reich. Yet Zeitblom’s thoughts and expressions reveal that Nazi ideology has had a greater effect on him than he would like us to believe. In the very first paragraph, for example, he refers to the German dominions as “our beleaguered Fortress Europe” (5/11), employing a term coined by Joseph Goebbels and combining it with the first-person plural in a telling fashion. In subsequent chapters, we’ll also witness Zeitblom express barely contained pride at German military accomplishments and lapse into anti-Semitic stereotypes.

Second, although he claims to be writing a factual account of the life of his good friend Adrian Leverkühn, Zeitblom imposes an allegorical (and thus clearly stylized) structure upon his narrative. The very title of the book is an example of this, since it primes the reader to approach the life of Leverkühn as a modern-day version of the Faustus myth. Zeitblom gives ample support for such an allegorical reading, for he stresses details such as the clubfoot of Eberhard Schleppfuss, and he also frames the report that Leverkühn composes during his visit to Palestrina in a way that strongly suggests a visitation by the devil, even though it may well just be the document of a fever dream. If we read the novel carefully, we in fact discover that there is no definitive evidence of a pact with the devil, or of the presence of demonic elements; instead, we become increasingly entangled in a web of postulates and leading assertions. This is not to say that Zeitblom is lying, and certainly the novel becomes a whole lot less entertaining if we assume (as some critics have done) that he is inventing all the Satanic episodes.3See. e.g., Karin L. Crawford, “Exorcising the Devil from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus,” German Quarterly 76, no. 2 (2003): 168–82. But it is to say that Zeitblom is unreliable—that is, we cannot simply take at face value what he is telling us and need to struggle for our own understanding of what is happening.

Third, Zeitblom does not shy away from inventing detailed descriptions of scenes that he cannot possibly have witnessed. A good example occurs in chapter XLI, in the imagined conversation between Leverkühn and Schwerdtfeger in which the former convinces the latter to propose to Marie Godeau on his behalf. Sometimes (as here) Zeitblom is forthright about such inventions, other times he is not.

Fourth, and in an inversion of the third point, Zeitblom sometimes misses crucial details. Thus, he does not notice that Frau von Tolna bears an uncanny resemblance to Hetaera Esmeralda. This, too, is a form of unreliable narration, for it means that an attentive reader will, over the course of the novel, become ever more mistrustful of Zeitblom’s limitations.

Unreliable narration is not by itself an indicator of literary modernism. For instance, both Laurence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) employ unreliable narrators. That said, the technique is certainly strongly associated with the modernist period. The unreliable narration of Doctor Faustus can be described as distinctively modernist for two reasons, one of them pointing backwards towards the nineteenth century, the other forward towards the postwar period. The backwards-pointing reason is that this technique allows an author to create works that superficially resemble the creations of the bourgeois nineteenth century, but actually expose these conventions to doubt and even mockery. Mann, who like Zeitblom firmly believed that he lived at the end of the bourgeois era, was drawn to such parody and also thematizes it within Doctor Faustus.4Mann already expressed his firm belief that he lived at the end of the bourgeois era when he was still a young man and became plagued with self-doubts whether his debut novel would stand the test of time in the twentieth century. See his letter to his brother Heinrich (“Buddenbrooks was a novel of the bourgeoisie and means nothing to the twentieth century”) reprinted in Hans Wysling, ed. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1909–1949, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 118–19. For instance, Leverkühn’s violin concerto mocks some of the more sentimental musical practices of the nineteenth century.

Arguably the more important reason why Mann chose to include an unreliable narrator in Doctor Faustus, however, is that this technique allowed him to raise ethical questions that were already pressing when he began the novel in 1943, but whose importance would rise exponentially in the years that followed. Serenus Zeitblom is a narrator who, though not directly culpable for any of the crimes committed by the Nazis, has nevertheless soaked up their rhetoric and ideology to a greater extent than he is willing to acknowledge. He frames the story of Adrian’s life as an allegory for German history, but he does so in a way that puts the ultimate responsibility for its most terrifying aspects on the shoulders of external demonic forces. And he embellishes where it seems useful while shying away from deeper investigations into inconvenient questions. In all these respects, he resembles the millions of Germans who, in the years after the downfall of the Nazis, lied about or prettified their personal experiences while insisting that the real fault for the events of the last twelve years lay with others. Mann resented such moral pusillanimity, which he encountered in his interactions both with the postwar “inner emigration” and with fellow exiles in America—including many Marxist thinkers, who were more than willing to lay blame for the crimes of the Nazis exclusively at the feet of “capital” while downplaying the culpability of working-class Germans.5See Herbert Lehnert, “Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and the ‘Free Germany’ Movement,” in Exile: The Writer’s Experience, ed. John M. Spalek and Robert F. Bell (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 182–202. With the figure of Serenus Zeitblom, he sought to hold up a mirror to his contemporaries and compatriots. As I have argued in the introduction to this volume, his decision to do so is one of the major reasons why Doctor Faustus still speaks to our own era, which may well call for a similar process of moral reckoning.