SOURCE: “Comic Configurations and Types in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1, February, 1983, pp. 6-19.

In the following essay, Amrine traces comic archetypes, symbols, and themes in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

I

Goethe himself ranked the Lehrjahre among the ‘most incalculable productions,’¹ yet critics have more often complained that the final sum is drawn all-too-neatly.² The ending of the novel, where all the loose ends of the plot are tied up in a flurry of disclosures leading to three marriages, has been felt to be inorganic—something appropriate to a comic novel or even a Trivialroman, but very much out of place in the progenitor of a new and complex historical genre. Emil Staiger has gone so far as to suggest a failure of nerve on Goethe's part, a victory of convenience over aesthetic judgment: ‘Mit den Vermählungen, die am Schluβ bevorstehen...