it became overwhelmingly clear pretty early in this novel that Werther is an extremely volatile character. This volatility feels like a ticking time bomb through the story and eventually it is his undoing. Now, I don’t know enough about psychology to throw words around like bipolar, but I hope I understand enough to say he shows symptoms of it. He experiences extremely high highs and low lows. At the beginning of the novel, he is in an incredibly elated state. Werther is in a state of pure tranquility and joy. He paints, reads homer, and finds a weird amount of happiness in meeting townspeople. He meets Lotte and says “Oh, the angel! For your sake I must live (Page 38)!” However, only a little under a month later he casually mentions that Lotte plays good music “Often at a time when I would like to put a bullet through my head (Pg. 43)!” These drastic mood changes are dangerous to both Werther and the people around him. When caught up in his feelings for Charlotte, he can no longer reason the way he once did. At the beginning of the novel, he expresses that every man believes their woman to be an angel but none are, and then soon begins referring to Charlotte as one.
His propensity for anger and mood swings are also highlighted in his rant towards Schmidt. While being frustrated at Schmidt’s sullen attitude he goes on a tirade about how one should always be in a good mood. This exchange is humorous, but also incredibly frustrating that he can’t see his own hypocrisy.
The brilliant part of this novel is that we expect this decline. Everything I just described happened in the first half of the novel In the first two pages, the writer has Werther describe how he “swings from grief to excess, and from sweet melancholy to ruinous passion (10).” In the first few pages, the author gives us the lens through which we are to read the book: closely analyzing our narrator’s mood and mindset, always aware of its quick changes.
In addition, I think I would be remiss not to point out the extreme mention of linden trees throughout the book. In German folklore they represent truth, they believed people couldn’t lie while standing underneath one. This narrator is extremely unreliable (and I have no reason to believe what I’m going to hypothesize) but I like to think that in the moments he speaks of linden trees he is telling the truth
I completely agree that there were signs of him being a metaphorical ticking time bomb since the beginning, and on the note of the signs of being bipolar I also have to agree. Whenever he was in a good mood, he was soaring on a high, and it bordered on an almost manic high. The lows? We saw how they went and ended with. I loved how it was set up, and despite the author priming the readers since the beginning to see, predict, and watch Werther’s inevitable demise unfold it wasn’t in a dull or boring way. It’s also funny to me that despite Werther’s hypocrisy, I wouldn’t ever describe him as a liar. He’s self-aware of himself to not paint the world in a way that isn’t true, he doesn’t try to fool himself into thinking Lottie’s fiancé is some sort of monster, and he’s pretty genuine with showing his feelings even if he doesn’t understand them. There were so many layers to Werther’s hypocrisy, he beauty he saw in the world, his lack of control over his own emotions, and how everything spirals around him and the multitudes of “what-could-have-been” in the novel.