He believes himself to be half man and half wolf. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.” That is why so many people live such an unreal life. “There is no reality except the one contained within us. Her presence is the only thing preventing Harry from killing himself and surrendering to the endless sleep.įor Harry is a man split in two: he is the Steppenwolf. As per the surrealist mode, reality is warped in an attempt to find some higher truth. This imagined woman becomes a lifeline, a beacon in the middle of the dark shores of modernization. None of this is actually happening it is the desperate ramblings of a mind trying to heal itself in a world where it can find no sense of belonging or purpose.
And this is why the novel is so terribly sad. She gives him back everything he has lost, his confidence, his hope and his sexual energy. He wants hope, so he creates it himself in the form of a counterpart, a soul mate: Hermione. His loneliness is that extreme, he has written an idealized account of his life that never happened. He has lost his faith in humanity and has completely withdrawn from the world, so he makes his own world: he has created his own ideal environment within his thoughts. His intellect is, undoubtedly, worthy of genius, though such a thing is wasted because he has no proper channel for such intellect. Through these pages Hesse evokes a character I have seen many times before across literature, but never before with such clarity. What Hesse describes, and his use of the lone wolf of the steppe as a symbol is brilliant, is about a time when an individual finds himself alone and in transition – as in a mature man who approaches old age, or as a young person leaving behind the securities of childhood for the uncertainties of adult life. Of course, the book was written about a man as he turns 50, not a youth.īut I think I can understand why this also speaks to young readers. Hesse said, “Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any other”. Many of his books are talking about journey of finding true identity of oneself and this kind of self- examiniation and self-discovery usually starts from teenage years.
Kurt Vonnegut exactly described why I have immersed into many of Hesse’s works such as Demian, Narziss and Goldmund, Under the Rad and Siddhartha since I was a teenager. Vonnegut also went on to describe how Hesse speaks to young readers, how he speaks to the essence of youth and offers hope. Kurt Vonnegut said that Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf was “the most profound book about homesickness ever written”.
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