Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: Analysis of Setting
"Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man" is a novel by Thomas Mann that explores the life of its titular character, a charming and deceptive individual navigating through various European cities. The analysis of the setting in this work highlights key locations such as Lisbon, Paris, and Frankfurt, each of which contributes to Felix's character development and narrative journey. Lisbon serves as a vibrant backdrop where Felix extends his stay, engaging in seduction and luxury while enjoying the city's southern European allure, reminiscent of classical cultures. Paris transforms Felix from a penniless worker to a self-proclaimed aristocrat, although he remains largely indifferent to its cultural treasures, preferring the anonymity of its streets and the complexities within the Hotel Saint James and Albany. Frankfurt, in contrast, represents a cold and commercial world that shapes Felix’s early experiences of alienation and class distinction, pointing to the burgeoning urban consumerist culture. Lastly, the Krull home, depicted as a bourgeois setting filled with sensory delights, frames Felix's childhood and early aspirations, foreshadowing his later escapades. The vivid settings in Mann's narrative not only enhance the story but also reflect the interplay between environment and the protagonist's evolving identity.
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: Analysis of Setting
First published:Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull: Der Memoiren erster Teil, 1954 (English translation, 1955)
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Picaresque
Time of work: Early twentieth century
Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
Places Discussed
*Lisbon
*Lisbon. Portugal’s capital city was to be only a brief stop on a world tour that Felix undertakes using an identity he has traded with an aristocratic Parisian friend. Because of a chance encounter on the Paris-to-Lisbon train with a distinguished paleontologist, his visit is extended for many weeks so that he can exploit his new identity in attempting to seduce the man’s wife and daughter.
Lisbon is one of many southern European destinations found in Thomas Mann’s fiction; the most celebrated occurs in Death in Venice (1912), but a more compelling literary source for the notion of a sojourn in a southern region is the Italian journey of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), whose life and work permeated the consciousness of writers like Mann. For both authors, southern Europe represents not merely a gentler climate but also the warmth and grace of classical and Mediterranean cultures as well as a relaxation of the cultural and sexual inhibitions of home.
Lisbon is the one locale in The Confessions of Felix Krull evoked with any great degree of topographic detail; its hills and streets, people and dwellings—and a bull ring still in use today—are colorfully described. However, Mann had little interest in visual detail for its own sake. In his last year he observed, “The world of the eyes is not my world.” The vividness of Krull’s description of Lisbon is Mann’s masterful interpretation of his character’s evolving experience. Though the beauty and grandeur of the city predictably fail to have an effect on Felix’s character, at last his love of luxury and sensuous pleasure is in harmony with the physical environment.
If Mann had lived to continue his tale of Felix Krull, the episode in Lisbon would likely have been a point of transition to even more exotic escapades in South America, but the novel’s abrupt conclusion, with a scene in a garden followed by a hilarious seduction, makes the city itself seem to be a true consummation of Felix’s desire.
*Paris
*Paris. Felix arrives in the capital of France virtually penniless and leaves it a year later as an aristocrat, albeit a fake one; he is transformed in the City of Light, but not by it. Although he takes in the circus and the opera, and enjoys other modest pleasures that he can afford as a low-paid hotel worker, he gives little attention to the city’s famous monuments and other cultural riches, instead preferring to assume the role of a flâneur—a detached and idle denizen of the city’s boulevards and cafés. The most vivid excursion Felix offers his readers is a furtive mission to “rue de l’Echelle au Ciel”—Ladder to Heaven Street—to fence some jewelry he has pilfered only days earlier on his train journey to Paris. When he alludes to the “spaciousness and splendour” of Parisian scenes, his thoughts only serve to remind him of his disgraced late father exclaiming “Magnifique!” and “almost fainting at the memory” of his happy student days in the French capital.
The mainspring of life in Paris for Felix is his work in the Hotel Saint James and Albany, a first-class hotel in which he is first an elevator boy and later a waiter. The varied spaces of the hotel are brilliantly rendered in both their physical and social dimensions, and Felix is as much at home in the dreary workers quarters as in the fashionable dining room. In the busy hotel, unlike the bustling but anonymous streets of Paris, every motion and interaction must be negotiated with staff, bosses, and guests. Felix, who imagines himself as a spiritual and physical descendent of the god Hermes, moves gracefully into and out of astonishing relationships with men and women both young and old. The most poignant of these brief encounters is with Lord Strathbogie, who invites Felix to accompany him to his ancestral home near Aberdeen, Scotland, to be his valet and, ultimately, his heir. The character of Strathbogie is thought to be a partial self-portrait by Mann, as is the figure of Felix himself. From this perspective, one can see the geographical symbolism of the episode: the author’s youthful surrogate is destined for sun-drenched Southern climes, not the cold mists of the North.
*Frankfurt
*Frankfurt. German center of commerce and wealth. With the virtual collapse of the Krull family following the elder Krull’s suicide, Felix and his mother are forced to move to Frankfurt, a “great, cold-hearted city.” While his mother contrives to start a boardinghouse, Felix undertakes his self-education in the ways of the urban metropolis, but he must be content with pressing his face “against the magnificent gates of a pleasure garden.”
If Confessions of Felix Krull is a late, satirical form of the novel of personal development, or Bildungsroman, it is no longer nature or culture that is the classroom, but rather the modern industrial city with its alienation and class distinctions, which Felix absorbs and then transcends. In his enchantment at the city’s material treasures and his “eagerest desire to learn,” Felix is a harbinger of urban, consumerist culture.
Krull home
Krull home. Located in a town slightly to the west of Mainz, on the Rhine River in western Germany, the Krull home stands on a slope “happily exposed to the summer sun.” To the young Felix, the family’s bourgeois home stuffed with knick-knacks is a virtual Eden of sensuous pleasures; this is a condition that extends to the town, where as a youngster he engages in an act of theft of candy from an unattended delicatessen.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, when this novel is, roughly, set, travel is mostly by boat, carriage, or railway car; the automobile does not appear in the novel. Felix’s cherished first memory of an excursion is from age eight, when the family travels to Wiesbaden to attend the theater. There he sees and is enraptured by an operetta set in Paris, thus prefiguring his later experiences in the French capital.
Bibliography
Alter, Robert. Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. One of the better-known works on the picaresque novel, the book discusses changes in the genre as it moved across generations and national borders. The book treats several novels considered picaresque, including Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.
Hatfield, Henry. From the Magic Mountain: Mann’s Later Masterpieces. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979. A critical look at the novels of Thomas Mann based, in part, on Mann’s correspondence. The work addresses Mann’s increasing political awareness, his use of myth and comedy, and how he was viewed by his contemporaries.
Lewis, R. W. B. The Picaresque Saint. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959. A critical survey of the picaresque genre with a primary concentration on other novelists but many references to Mann; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man is judged to be one of his masterpieces and the “logical hero” of the age.
Mann, Erika. The Last Year of Thomas Mann. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1958. A firsthand account by Mann’s daughter of the inception and construction of Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. Written in memoir form, the work gives an intimate portrait of the author.
Torrance, Robert M. The Comic Hero. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. Traces the origin of the comic hero from his mythological antecedents through the modern novel. Contains an extended discussion of Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man as representative of the picaresque.