The original impetus to the following study was threefold. First, I felt uneasy with a prevailing critical attitude toward Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels: namely, that the Apprenticeship and the Journeyman Years remain ultimately irreconcilable with each other, and disunified and disjointed in themselves. Even though it exhibits outwardly all the features usually associated with a sequel – a parallel title, the reappearance of major characters, similar themes, and a continuous plot – Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years has not been considered a true sequel to the Apprenticeship. The unity of the first and second parts of Faust has long since ceased to be questioned, yet critics who accept the unity of these “most incalculable productions” as established are not prepared to grant the unity of the Apprenticeship and the Journeyman Years, even though the genesis of the latter pair is interrupted by a shorter hiatus than the genesis of Faust.