Brief thoughts on The Sorrows of Young Werther

I don’t have a lot to say about The Sorrows of Young Werther, my first encounter with Goethe. I’m a Jane Austen girl; Werther—what can I say—is annoying. But I’d like to note that Goethe does something unusual and odd with the form. The epistolary novel can do different things: it could be personal letters depicting the characters’ different perspectives and contradictory accounts of the same things (Richardson, Dangerous Liaisons, Lady Susan…); it could be a series of documents and testimonies (Dracula, The Moonstone…). Unlike these novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther only has Werther’s letters—there is a correspondence but we never hear the other side—Werther’s letters, mostly to his friend Wilhelm, function as a journal like Pamela’s unsent letters to her parents during her imprisonment. We’re stuck in his over-sensitive and neurotic and obsessive mind the same way we’re stuck in the claustrophobic and exhausting mind of the narrator in In Search of Lost Time. It is only towards the end that we get some different perspectives, when the editor of the letters, from the beginning of the book, reappears and narrates Werther’s last days. But if Werther’s letters are a device for realism—these texts exist because Werther writes letters to his best friend and other people—the editor/ narrator at the end breaks that realism—how does he know not only the actions but also Lotte’s thoughts and feelings of guilt? In a way, it’s rather awkward. But at the same time, I can see what Goethe is doing: he does not let us see Lotte till the end, just a short while before Werther kills himself over her. And that is interesting.