Chapter 3 - Conclusion: Werther and tragedy?

Summary

I have tried, in the foregoing pages, to give some account of the power of Goethe's Werther. I have suggested that we see the novel in a number of ways. We can view Werther as an extraordinarily convincing study in psychological decline, and we are made to participate in every current of emotion that takes Werther from the elation of the opening letters to the hideousness of the final self-destructive act. But we also see his story as one that charts the glories and the dangers of one particular kind of sensibility, a sensibility that bears the historical signature of the age of ‘Empfindsamkeit’. Goethe here pushes that sensibility to its extreme conclusion. And he does so with the radicalism with which all great literature asks us to imagine ‘What would happen if …?’ But, beyond that, Werther also is a tragic novel in that it traces not simply the sickness of one man, not simply the potential canker at the heart of one particular cultural sensibility, but also the tragedy of the human spirit in one of its most adventurous aspects. Seen in this way, Werther's is an acute, restless, and knowing mind, and his capacity for reflection blights his ability to live: his decline is an indictment of man's disunity.