I have read a Schweizerdeutsch Bildungsroman, “Der grüne Heinrich”. It is a story for people who look back their youths, or who would like to foresee their future in careful inspection. The main theme is virtues for human beings and religious thoughts, or from the opposite viewpoint escaping from the absolute being, in the intertextual coincidences surrounding the main character, der grüne Heinrich. The story is based on Switzerland and Germany in 19th century and quite a lot of materials are depended on the particular circumstances. However, in the light of the main theme there are many materials common to our age.
Both socio-politically and literary-historically the story is producing an atmosphere of 19th century. Furthermore, the story is partially an autobiography of the writer, Gottfried Keller. He first settled this story as a tragedy/disaster, which was inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu”, but later revised the prints to more attenuated form. By this revision, a failure of being someone and an establishment of one’s identity became a main theme of this story. Thus the story became one of the most famous Schweizerdeutsch Bildungsroman of the age. The organization of the story is not so complex, and the narration sincerely express the main character’s emotion at the stage and at looking back from the future, which are reliable. One interesting thing supposed is that this story can be viewed from both Christianism and atheism. The struggles between these two are questioned to the readers, by all the dramatical chains of coincidences occurring during the story. What are almost not described in the story is that after the successful mating of the main character and his final lover, there are 20 years of happiness and following 20 years of regrets. The possible stories for them are out of scope of the failure and the establishment of one’s identity. Furthermore, the final coincidence of the novel is such conclusive that there is no need to explain anymore. Therefore, the story of 40 years afterwards and possible recurrent coincidences are put into the reader’s hand.
From a viewpoint of structuralism, demanding two lovers in parallel invests the struggle, balancing and contrasts of the main characters. Echoes, reflections, repetitions, symmetry and patterns of coincidence could be related with religion. From a viewpoint of post-structuralism, open-ended question for the religion and atheism is a deconstruction of conclusive remarks for this topic. This theme invests fluidity of knowledge in consistence, from the end of youth and looking back from the age of old. There is no space for narcissistic attitudes of postmodernism, but there is more or less mixture of the cultures unique to each class. Psychoanalytically recurrent coincidences invoke the main character’s unconscious attitudes to the raised matters, and they act as recognitions of symbols for preceding and following incidents among all the sins and faults. Since the main character failed to be someone, a progression of society halted in the story. The familiarity to nature more or less invests ecocentric perspectives of later ages.
Overall, this story is a masterpiece of Bildungsroman.
