THOMAS MANN SUFFUSES WITH sadness and lament his telling of Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde. As the final clause of the novel's subtitle makes clear, the author's aspiration to produce a cultural etiology of German fascism depends above all on the fictional biographer Serenus Zeitblom, whose writing constitutes a double act of mourning — for his beloved friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, and for the destruction of Germany around him during the Second World War. At the allegorical juncture of these two histories are Zeitblom's narrative interventions, which draw out the mournfulness inherent in both, inviting us to interpret their parallel sadness as originating from a shared cause: a decadent will to self-annihilation. I would like to argue that the logic of this particular kind of narrative vocality is structurally and ethically analogous to a classic archetype of the melancholic voice: that of Echo, whose oftenoverlooked role in the story of Narcissus demands to be heard as an indispensable element of that mythic history. Both she and Zeitblom are, in a certain sense, figures of unrequited love; both are the agents of pathos, who lend their voices to the tragedies in which they figure; and both rely on a certain mode of repetition to construct their discourses, recontextualizing and redeploying the words of others to serve their own ends. In what follows, therefore, I will suggest that in a precise sense Zeitblom writes in an Echoic mode.