For this reason, Steppenwolf is still the kind of literature which can enrich the individual experience by pointing us back toward that added dimension. Thus, the storyline swirls through sensuality to find spirit, it dismantles the personality to promote a greater synthesis, and it bridges the divide between the temporal and eternal. Over the course of his narrative, Hesse s main character and alter-ego experiences his over-analyzed but poorly understood self through the lens of life’s great paradoxes. What Hesse offers us all is a potent combination of eastern and western insights into the human search for meaning.Īmong the themes he successfully weaves together into a universal fabric are Nietzschean philosophy, depth psychology, and Buddhism. But many of us feel a similar need to explore life’s depths in the midst of a culture that rarely sheds light upon the inner path. We do not all suffer from the same issues that Harry does, over-intellectualization and self-exile from society.
Yet the escape it provides from the pabulum of today’s entertainment is a welcome reminder of that something more to be found in human experience. Make no mistake, Steppenwolf is not a light read. Before his magical journey of discovery begins, he is nearly consumed by an almost suicidal paralysis in the face of that added dimension of existence which would bring it spiritual meaning. His tragic situation is born out of his inability to translate his blessings into love. Haller, like many of us, is torn in two by his love of comfort and safety, on the one hand, and his deeper drive for a more authentically creative existence on the other. His physical ailments are but symptoms of his true crisis, that of a lost soul, that of a life without meaning, that of a human without a love of humanity. The central character, Harry Haller, has all the insight, all the leisure, all the material goods he needs, yet he is not at peace with his life.
It is the story of the lone individual, lost in the ironic good fortune and security of bourgeois banality and cultural conformity. Perhaps it is more important in our current cultural climate than ever before. Hermann Hesse’s work Steppenwolf was first published in German in 1927, but what it contains is still relevant today. "A profoundly memorable and affecting novel, the gripping and fascinating story of disease in a man’s soul, and a ’savage indictment of bourgeois society.’" -_The New York Times_
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