Character personality
When Mortiz was a child, he played together with Melchior Gabor, Wendla Bergmann, and Ilse. The children grew older and because the boys and girls were separated into different schools, grew apart.
Moritz did, however, remain close friends with Melchior. More accurately, he grew to idolize and adore Melchior. His friend was everything he was not: smart, handsome, rebellious, brave, top of his class. Moritz was gangly and awkward, always tripping over his own two feet. He couldn't even get the socks of his uniform to stay up properly. He was always a hair's breadth away from failing out of school, though not for lack of trying. He studied as hard as he could, but he could never quite grasp the material as Melchior could.
Worse than that, Moritz was plagued by dreams. They were the typical dreams of any fifteen year old boy -- a woman's legs clad in sky blue stockings, climbing over the lecture podium, and the like. But his dreams plagued him, haunted him. They drove him mad to the point of losing sleep at night for fear of what his dreams might bring him. Even the essay on sex Melchior wrote him was no help, it only made things worse. His dreams became more vivid and more frequent.
Amidst this whirlwind of hormones were his increasingly confusing feelings towards his friend Melchior. They'd been friends since Moritz could remember, and yet at times he felt the affection he had towards his friend was a little more than brotherly or friendly.
Moritz could not cope under pressure. The combined weight of his failure in school, his own emerging sexuality, and his father's disgust in his failure forced Moritz to collapse and fold. He tried to run to America, but Frau Gabor's refusal prevented that.
He met briefly with his old friend Ilse and was given a small amount of hope, for a brief period of time. He and Ilse reminisced about their childhood days, and Ilse told him of her life in the artist colony. She asked him to come home with her and his poor, sex obsessed mind interpreted it as an invitation for sex. He turned her down, arguing with himself that while it would have been nice to have experienced before he died, he simply wasn't in the right frame of mind.
His refusal to go with Ilse added yet another failure to what felt to him like an endless list. He needed one thing in his life at which he didn't completely fail. Left with no other choice, Moritz stole his father's gun and ended his own life.
Unfortunately, Moritz finds death to be no more freeing or peaceful than his life was. He's cold and more lonely than he had ever been. Forced to merely watch the living, Moritz is driven further and further into the loneliness of his afterlife. When he sees his best friend at his grave, his first instinct is to try to get Melchior to join him. But when he sees that Melchior is, in fact, contemplating suicide, he realizes that isn't what he wants for his friend. As lonely as he is, Moritz can't bare to inflict the same pain and suffering on Melchior. So he whispers encouraging words and lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, urging him not to make the same mistakes that Moritz himself had.