Reality, according to Mann, reveals itself in antithetical ideas and situations. This explains why he is being literally plunged in medias res at the beginning and why he leaves the sanatorium just as quickly. Only a relatively limited stretch of the hero's life is singled out for close observation: Castorp has lived to be twenty-three years old before he sets foot on the magic mountain, and his life continues after the outbreak of the war. Mann destroys the notion of past and future by merging them into one continuous Now ("Excursus" or "By the Ocean of Time"). This accounts for the intercalary sections which unravel the past and tie it to the future ("Of the Christening Basin," "At Tienappels," or "Hippe"). The plot does not move from beginning to end in the conventional and reportorial sense because it is the correlative, not of the hero's story, but of his experience. On the highest level, The Magic Mountain tries to convey the experience of time by narrating it.
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