This study treats a central complex of issues which have hitherto received little attention from Goethe scholars, namely the question of the conception and position of the subject in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novels and shorter narrative pieces. In his study the author combines approaches from the history of ideas and poetology in a systematic way and succeeds in demonstrating that the question of the ego, its identity and boundaries is a recurring problem in Goethe's writings, and one that he obviously did not succeed in resolving; at the same time he shows that Goethe's figures, with their internal breaks, already display clear features of the modern subject.