Chapter 4 - Interlude
The “Sick Prince”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2020
Summary
In discussing the Apprenticeship with Eckermann in 1825, Goethe owned that he himself almost lacked the key to that “incalculable production.” It is difficult and perhaps inadvisable, he claimed, to seek such a midpoint, a “decided tendency” which would exist only conceptually. Yet interpreters were and are wont to do just this, and, after pronouncing this caveat, Goethe allowed that one might after all look to the end of the novel:
[B]ut if one really wants such a thing, then one should cleave to the words of Friedrich, which he addresses at the end to our hero, by saying: you strike me like Saul, the son of Kis, who went out seeking his father’s she-asses, and found a kingdom. One should hold on to that.
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- Information
- Goethe and the Myth of the BildungsromanRethinking the <I>Wilhelm Meister</I> Novels, pp. 77 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020