Expression and exposure
The character trait that defines Adrian Leverkühn is his secrecy and strangeness. People do not get to connect with him very often and when they do, it isn't necessarily intimate, and when it is intimate, it never lasts anyway. Yet, to Adrian, we know there is another imagery defining his emotional landscape. He cannot express himself to others, and he does not want to be misunderstood. He needs the release of exposure, but without the language (or music) to correctly express himself, he often cloisters himself up in his mind where his loneliness is amplified. As a genius without language to express his masterful perception of reality, he suffers.
The unconscious and reality
To put it one way, Adrian seems to be a case study of a specific kind of consciousness that arises in geniuses of a certain kind. Their abilities are not the expression of their genius, as with cases like Mozart or Beethoven. Instead, their genius resides not in ability but in perception. What is the subject of Adrian's genius perception? It is his own emotions, his mind, and his consciousness. Although he never takes psychology classes, his religious and philosophical education, witchy and dark as they are, are perfect demonstrations of this internal imagery. When he hears a religious teacher speaking of true magic and demonism, Adrian feels aligned already to that truth.
Genius and loneliness
Yet, for all his sagacious self-perception and mastery, young Adrian is still just a man in desperate need of community, understanding, and love. So alone is he that in his (syphilitic) madness, he becomes convinced that his fate is specifically to never enjoy love! He believes that God has turned him over to the playground of hell where now Satan is his master, not God. He believes that Satan has been assigned the task of torturing him with loneliness because he once experienced love with a woman, a prostitute, out of wedlock. He was never eligible for romance, he feels, so the sin is not the prostitution or sex out of wedlock; he feels the sin was that he was intimate with a person. It is the only time he ever has enjoyed intimacy. This is an imagery depiction of loneliness, as interpreted by the psychology of a genius madman.
Demons and witchcraft
If this novel were to be classified aesthetically within the genres of modern music, this novel might be called "Death Metal." It is macabre and haunting, and even the moments of time when Adrian should be seeing something holy and sacred, he sees something horrifying and confusing instead. He goes to school to study God and religion, but he leaves having studied alchemy, witchcraft, and the demonic nature of the human soul. He falls in love, but not with a woman in white; he instead sacrifices his own self on the altar of love for a prostitute with syphilis. He knows in advance that uniting himself to her will mean syphilis, but he accepts that fate. He is a religious prophet, archetypally speaking, but instead of witnessing heaven, he witnesses hell. This imagery is complete when he starts having full blown hallucinations where he receives prophecies from Satan.
