Herman Hesse Steppenwolf is a novel exploring the existential crisis of its protagonist Harry Haller. It is a novel about the manuscript left by the author to the nephew of the landlady whose house the author stays in an unknown city.
Essentially this novel is a ‘Bildungsroman’, a prominent genre in German literature is a novel of education. Haller comes to us as a sort of split personality in the initial stage of the novel. He identifies in himself two contradicting personalities one of the intellectual and the other of the wolf. He exists and lives within the bourgeoise yet hates the absurdity of their lives. Every step of his life is a constant struggle between these two forces ever fighting among themselves to assert their superiority. In this way, he contemplates suicide as a way out of life, and he decides to kill himself on his fiftieth birthday.
Harry Haller idolizes Goethe and Mozart like them he wants to live in the world of the immortals. Yet he is scared and does not seem to possess the bravery needed to achieve it. In a sense, he is not able to overcome the self-preservation that he himself loathes in the bourgeoise. For all his pretensions he still belongs to this very society he despises deeply. In this agitated state of existence, by chance, he meets a woman, maybe as this part of the manuscript, one can only speculate the reality of everything that happens after it. Maybe it’s his subconscious that yearns for it. This woman commands Harry to a new life, a life that he himself has stubbornly refused to himself. A life characterized by jazz music and dance and everything that in the past life Harry considers as repulsive. The woman points out to Harry how stupid his life has been, and she shows to him the pleasures of everything around him. Harry is amazed by her ability to live for the moment, the way she treasures every little wayside flower with loving care, and how she derives value from every playful little instant. She constantly reminds him of his silly little concerns like a mother she chides him for being too serious about life.
At some point she says, there are some people who make the highest possible demands on life and have a hard time coming to terms with the stupidity and coarseness of life. At the end of the novel, the entire sequence turns magical and absurd at the same time. Harry enters into a make-believe world created for him, he explores everything and we as the reader get a view into his subconscious. The novel ends when Harry tries to kill the woman tormented by jealousy and finally understands that he has still not learned to laugh at life but he will eventually be there at some point. There is a poignant sequence at the end, Handel’s music is played in an absurd instrument, and Harry initially is repulsive to this poor quality music but Mozart points to him that even though this music is poor yet you can discern the quality of it if you care to listen. This becomes a metaphor for life itself, in life too one should take seriously what is worth taking seriously and laugh about the rest.
The key themes in the novel are how should one live if death is going to end everything and what is worthy of striving. The novel seems to indicate that as an intellectual sometimes we need to laugh at ourselves and things around us and try to take pleasure in the truly happy moments around us. The novel is heavily inspired by the philosophy of Nietzsche, laughter is an important image in his writings. All the immortals in this novel, Goethe or Mozart are depicted laughing their hearts out. Till the end we see the inability of Harry to laugh, and his nature to take everything seriously. The novel calls us to be authentic and act without worrying about eternity, even if nobody knows about it is part of eternity. Life is much shallower if we are fighting for something good and ideal in the belief that we are bound to achieve it, ideals are not always there to be acheived.
Ashok 