Jürg enjoys the available summer recreational activities, swimming and sailing, while supporting himself by submitting little articles and reports to a newspaper back home.
Rumours begin to circulate of a possible euthanasia, and the local authorities anticipate the opportunity to proceed against an unloved Austrian doctor called "Heller".
Finally Jürg, who is still visiting the guesthouse for several more weeks, and helping with Inge's administrative matters, admits to her mother that he was the one who administered the lethal injection.
Early in 1933 Max Frisch traveled to the world ice-hockey championship in Prague, employed as a sports correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).
The planned two week assignment mutated into an eight-month journey, taking in Budapest, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Istanbul and Athens.
Frisch wrote with enthusiasm about his hostess in letters home, as well as a piece for the NZZ that opened with the words: "Actually these Dalmatian days were exasperating: you cannot paint them but must leave the brilliant colours behind when you depart.
[9] This idyllic phase in his journey of self-discovery was ended abruptly by a letter he received from his mother dated 16 August 1933 and reporting the death of Ehrengard von Woedtke, the daughter at the guesthouse where he had stayed in Dubrovnik.
[15] According to Julian Schütt, this explains to the carefully crafted dialogue section at the beginning of the book in which Jürg is found fending off the advances of a determined Dutch woman of riper years.
In 1944 Gustav Kilpper, DVA's general director confessed the "beneath all the monstrosities and horrors of daily life, the people and events about which you write, bring us back to the private and fundamentally unimportant".
[23] Urs Bircher highlights the "sentimental journey" elements of this "travel novel", but he too detected some aspects and structures more reminiscent of "trivial writing" ("Trivialliteratur").
[31][32] The contrast created in the novel is between Jürg Reinhart and Robert von Reisner who embodies casual loveless sexuality and carnal irresponsibility.
For Walburg Schwenke the novel, in common with all Max Frisch's early work, is in the first instance a presentation of the fundamental existential conflict between the bourgeois life and the artistic existence.
Nevertheless, the depiction of von Reisner never progresses beyond a stereotype, and really serves only to confirm that for Jürg Reinhart, and indeed with regard to Frisch's own decision to pursue self-realisation through literature, there can be no alternative.
Even the preference for the "simple life" evidenced by traveling to Greece rather than remaining in the more socially constrained "civilisation" of the holiday resort reflects some of these influences.
[34] In his biography of Frisch Julian Schütt pointed out how the conclusion of the novel echoes some of the ideas of the eugenics movement which at the time were increasingly mainstream in popular consciousness across western Europe.
[35][38] This calls to mind the deathly idea of "Destruction of the unworthy life" ("Vernichtung unwerten Lebens“) which was already widespread in Nazi Germany, but which was also being discussed in Switzerland.
"[45] In Frisch's presentation of "the active life" (des " tätigen Lebens“) as essential to human fulfillment Petersen detects echoes of the nineteenth century philosopher-statesman, Goethe.
[46] However, Alexander Stephan attributes the emphasis on "manly strength and maturity" and the "great deed" to nothing more mysterious than the popular mood taking hold across much of Europe during the 1930s.
[50] Alexander Stephan highlights additional complex themes that were introduced in this first novel, and which returned with new emphasis in Frisch's later works: the autobiographical aspects, the artist as the outsider, the unfulfilled seeking after happiness and love, and with these, in particular, the sea as symbolizing freedom and fulfillment, along with communication of the living and the dead.
[51] Volker Hage pointed out the vague guilt with which the hero is left at the end, concerning which no legal process can pronounce a verdict, which is a theme that would return in Bluebeard (1982), Frisch's last novel.
[24][53] Frisch's first-born novel was positively received by contemporary critics, almost without exception providing him with adulatory publicity and setting him above other young Swiss writers of the time.
Leonhard Beriger missed the "lively intellectual interplay" (den „lebendigen geistigen Austausch“) such as was provided by Jakob Schaffner (a Swiss novelist sympathetic to the political ideology of Germany in the Nazi period).
[47][55] Hellmut Schlien, writing in Die Literatur in 1934, thought that the novel showed very great promise, and gave its youthful author what he called "an honest word of encouragement along the way" („ein ehrliches Wort der Aufmunterung mit auf den Weg“).
Writing in Der Bund, Hugo Marti found "the young Parzival from Zürich" excessively garrulous, but the encounter was nevertheless essentially characterized by sympathy and empathy.
[62] Instead, the NZZ published a fictitious interview, and later Korrodi pushed a gloss regarding Frisch, concerning a young author who scanned the windows of all the book shops looking for his own first novel.
In December 1934 the Zürich Literature Commission recognized the achievement with a 500 franc award, noting that it was "poignant how the hero grew to manhood by taking a major responsibility to himself,"[64] in an evolution of the plot "from the erotic to the ethical".
[65] It took Emil Ermatinger to offer in a note the qualification that the work was "an extensive display of a man with a somewhat unnatural soul"[66][67] Privately, the author received further critical reproof from his friend Werner Coninx.
[70] Volker Hage emphasized that the work could not "avoid being characterized as a beginner's novel, but that does not invalidate it as a literary mark of a twenty-three year old author's progress.