Quote:
Originally Posted by desertblues
Well, part of my deception of reading the book was the lack of depth and growth of the
characters. Tony made bad decision after bad decision and she didn't learn from it, even though she proclaimed herself to be wiser in the ways of the world. She vacillated in her own make-believe-world and didn't grow up. The 'stays' of society and her family held her floating.
I can believe that Thomas Mann made an example of a family that didn't have any growth in it. There is nothing heroic, in the moral sense, in these people.
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I agree. It's more a tragedy. Tony drinks the Buddenbrooks kool aid and that fight she put up before Grunlich was the last of what I thought of an independent/spirited thought. Her whole value after that point was to make herself a worth commodity for the family name and all her passion went into that.
In a way she was worse than Thomas because at least Thomas saw the hopelessness of the role he was to play. He strove and strove but you got the impression from his various speeches that he knew he was not up to the task. And as the book progresses he becomes more like this ridiculous shell - empty inside.
But in the end, their fall was necessary. To me, it was a lesson about the world (and in this case Germany) changing and them not changing with it. Remaining trapped within a family tradition or within the pages of its notebook, made this family more and more an anachronism.