SOURCE: "Mundane Magic: Some Observations on Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl," in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. XII, No. 3, July, 1976, pp 250-62.

In the following essay, Swales investigates the ambiguous shadow motif of Peter Schlemihl "as the paradigm for that uncertain moral and social situation which the novel so brilliantly explores."

By any standards, Peter Schlemihl is a most engaging story.¹ On several occasions, Chamisso asserted that the work was originally written to amuse children, and its combination of verbal and situational humour leaves one in little doubt that it fulfils this purpose admirably. One wonders, however, whether careful textual study would not reveal the story to be much more than a beguiling fantasy. Certainly a number of critics have felt that Peter Shlemihl must be taken as a completely serious work of art, and scholarly interpreters have argued that the shadow embodies a deeper meaning which transforms the...