a new boy at school, Max Demian. Demian alleviates Sinclair’s moral confusion by telling him of the god Abraxas, in whom good and evil are fused and who represents the highest moral order. Demian also emphasizes the decline of European civilization, predicts its impending doom, and anticipates the advent of a regeneration of the world. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Demian’s prophecy comes true. Both Demian and Sinclair are called up, and the latter is wounded. He is brought to a field hospital, where he has a final encounter with Demian, who lies dying; Sinclair is then separated from his mentor forever, but he believes himself to be the inheritor of his friend’s personality.

Considered as a whole, therefore, the division of the novel is tripartite: Sinclair goes from a state of initial “light,” of childhood innocence and security, to a period of “dark,” of doubt and inner torment, to a final internal synthesis of the two antipodes. The novel is somewhat fraught with symbols that are intended to underscore the universality of this sequence; one of the book’s central dream images is elucidated in a manner that succinctly captures the dynamics of any process of individuation: “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” Demian is Sinclair’s shaman for this process of destruction (Socrates used the word daimon to describe the admonishing inner spirit), a process that Hesse imbues with tension by mixing Nietzschean thought, Christian terminology, and a religious, often parable-like tone. At the end of the novel, Sinclair has internalized Demian, much as the Church Fathers and later Christian authors admonished their readers to internalize Christ. Emil Sinclair is, therefore, now a missionary of the new gospel of Demian (read: Hesse)—namely, that one must be willing to suffer the progressive alienation and pain that result from shedding traditional or inherited strictures and definitions, a necessary divestiture that will ultimately make possible a rejuvenation, an authentic sense of self-identity.

Siddhartha

Siddhartha, Hesse’s second major novel and arguably his best-known work, took nearly four years to complete. Siddhartha is the product both of Hesse’s trip to India in 1911 and of his lifelong fascination with that country’s philosophy and religion. At the same time, however, it would be an oversimplification to state (as some critics have done) that this novel is a paean to Indic philosophy or Eastern mysticism, since the implicit admonition of the work is that one must seek one’s own way in life and not simply adhere to a prescribed system or path.

The plot of Siddhartha exhibits the essential tripartite structure of all Hesse’s works, two-section and twelve-chapter divisions notwithstanding: The Brahman’s son Siddhartha (whose name means “he who has achieved his aim”) leaves his paternal home, has the requisite educative experiences of a bildungsroman protagonist, and finally achieves peace. What makes Siddhartha such an atypical and successful “novel of education” are its Eastern setting and its complementary stylistic features, the latter signifying a level of technical originality and subtlety Hesse was never again to achieve. Feeling restless, Siddhartha forsakes his home and the teachings of Brahmanism and, with his friend Govinda, becomes a total ascetic. Still unsatisfied, he considers the teachings of Buddha but ultimately departs from him, leaving Govinda behind. As an alternative to his previous existence, Siddhartha seeks a life of the senses; the courtesan Kamala teaches him the art of love, and he acquires a great deal of wealth. After a time, however, he comes to feel that this surfeit of sensual pleasures is robbing him of his soul, and he takes sudden leave of this life and of Kamala, unaware that she is pregnant. In despair and on the verge of suicide, he encounters the wise ferryman Vasudeva, from whom he learns “the secrets of the river,” the simultaneity, unity, and timelessness of all that is: This stone is stone: it is also animal, it is also God, it is also Buddha. I love and venerate it not because it might someday become this or that—but because it has long been all these things and always will be.

After Siddhartha has spent twelve years at the river, Kamala unexpectedly arrives with their son, whereupon she is bitten by a snake and dies. Siddhartha’s son rejects his father’s love and teaching—just as Siddhartha himself rejected his father many years earlier—but the protagonist overcomes his anguish and loss with the help of the river. Vasudeva dies, Siddhartha becomes the ferryman in his place, and the narrative concludes with the reunion of Siddhartha and Govinda.

Like Demian, Siddhartha is meant to carry universal implications. The protagonists in both novels are stylized figures whose lives and personalities are only episodically sketched, since what was important to Hesse was less their individuality as literary personae than what they embodied. Both stories possess only a modicum of realistic narrative, and both central figures represent the path of individuality that, Hesse was convinced, must be chosen by all self-seekers. Demian’s Abraxas and Siddhartha’s river are simply narrative means to this end, symbols of the conflux of opposites, the harmony one experiences with self and all existence in a heightened state of self-awareness. As Hesse stated in his diary of 1920, “Nirvana, as I understand it, is the liberating step back behind the principium individuationis.” Artistically, however, Demian and Siddhartha are very different. Unlike Demian—and indeed, unlike the several major novels of Hesse to followSiddhartha maintains a stylistic simplicity and an extraordinary harmony of form and substance that Hesse was never again to capture. The book’s initial paragraph reveals, even in translation, much of the stylistic genius of Siddhartha: In the shade of the house, in the sun of the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the Sal forest, in the shade of the fig tree Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, along with Govinda, his friend, the son of the Brahman.

The paratactic repetitions—incantatory, alliterative, and often threefold in nature—give the work an almost liturgical quality that is consonant with the novel’s theme and setting and that exerts a subliminal but obviously well-calculated effect on the reader. Hesse’s following work was to be a radical departure in terms of both style and narrative tack.

Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf, published in 1927, is certainly Hesse’s most unorthodox novel, one that Mann compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and André Gide’s Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925; The Counterfeiters, 1927) in experimental daring. Like these novels, Hesse’s work met with a great deal of criticism, a fact that is easily explained in the light of the demands that these narratives place on their readers. Although it is in places essentially surrealistic and is hence somewhat difficult to recapitulate adequately, Steppenwolf does evidence Hesse’s typical three-part structure: a preliminary or introductory segment, a somewhat realistic central section, and a final part chronicling the protagonist’s experiences in a “Magic Theater.”

An unnamed and self-described “bourgeois, orderly person” functions as the author of an introduction to the reflections of Harry Haller, whose first-person jottings he is editing. This editor also articulates the two poles of existence, the inner tension of Harry Haller, namely, his fundamental dichotomy as both “wolf” and “bourgeois.” The schizophrenic protagonist, a scholarly aesthete and conformist by day but at night an outsider who despises society and its values, describes himself as a living dualism: “I don’t know why it is, but I—the homeless Steppenwolf and lonely hater of the petty bourgeois world—I always live in proper middle-class houses.” Haller’s ruminations on his rootless existence are interrupted, however, by the interjection of a “Tract of the Steppenwolf,” a booklet that he has mysteriously acquired while on one of his frequent nocturnal walks. This tract, prefaced by the motto “only for madmen,” distinguishes between three levels of existence: that of the Bourgeois, that of the Immortals (the highest plane, which transcends all polarities), and that of the Steppenwolf, a level midway between the first two. In describing a particular Steppenwolf called Harry, the document suggests that he abandon polarity as a life-ordering principle and simply affirm all that is as good, and do so with “a sublime wisdom that can only be realized through humor.” Harry Haller is unable to comply, however, and he soon takes up with several sympathizers. Hermine, an oracular prostitute, and Pablo, a drug-using saxophone player, show Haller that there are others of his ilk who choose not to conform to society and yet are happy among themselves. Finally, Harry enters into the “Magic Theater” alluded to in the “Tract” and announced earlier in the novel as well. In this penny arcade of the mind, he sheds the final vestiges of his bourgeois personality by means of a series of surreal, drug-induced experiences. The novel concludes on a note of cautious optimism, with Haller projecting that he will someday “play the game of figures better,” that he will someday “learn how to laugh.”

As Hesse made obvious by the choice of Harry Haller as his protagonist’s name, Steppenwolf is a highly autobiographical work. Haller’s physiognomy, habits, and tastes are Hesse’s, as is his basic psychological dilemma. Hesse at the time of the novel’s composition was a fifty-year-old man looking inward and outward with little satisfaction. This accounts for the self-laceration as well as the cultural pessimism of Steppenwolf, and such disharmony and negativity reflect an inner relapse on the part of the author of the placid Siddhartha. Whether Hesse himself indulged in the erotic and chemical adventures of his protagonist is not known and, ultimately, is of little consequence. Certain, however, is the fact that Hesse suffered a good deal of censure as a result of these elements of the book, a fact that distressed him greatly and caused him to compose and publish in 1928 a poetic postlude to the novel, titled Krisis, a candid personal account of his intention in writing Steppenwolf and an assessment of the literary realization of this intention.

Like those of many of Hesse’s novels, the ending of Steppenwolf is abrupt and unsatisfactory. The concept of humor as a tool for rising above inner and outer tensions seems an inadequate solution for Haller’s problems, and one senses that this is a very forced conclusion. This feeling is reinforced as well by the amazing formal pendulations of Hesse’s novels: Demian employs psychological symbolism, Siddhartha utilizes psychological exoticism, and Steppenwolf uses psychological fantasy and even hallucination in order to delineate the same essential problems (How does one arrive at any true self-definition? How is one to reconcile inner polarities, the flesh and the spirit? What is the artist’s place in society?) via a variety of expressive modes. If the endings are often truncated or lacking in aesthetic closure, it is because these individual “fragments of a long confession” (Hesse’s phrase) represent only one phase, one segment of a process that was to continue. It is no surprise, therefore, that Hesse chose in his next novel yet another narrative format with which to allegorize his dualistic dilemmas.

Narcissus and Goldmund

Much like Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund can be viewed as a lull following a storm. Hesse himself described Narcissus and Goldmund as an essentially escapist tale, and it is the novel about which his critics are most divided. Joseph Mileck, for example, considers it Hesse’s finest work, whereas Theodore Ziolkowski flatly states that it is his “most imperfect” work; many critics find the story cloying and regard the novel as a whole as highbrow kitsch.

The names of the two protagonists are symbolic: Narcissus represents the world of the spirit—in this case, the medieval monastery—and is a prototype of the introverted, reflective, self-preoccupied individual; Goldmund (golden mouth) is an artistic extrovert who personifies the world of nature, of the flesh. Hesse once again presents the reader with types rather than with flesh-and-blood characters. Narcissus is the mentor of Goldmund in a monastic school called Mariabronn, but it soon becomes evident that the latter is rather unsuited for a celibate life. He leaves the monastery and leads a life replete with varied experiences and love affairs, all of which lead him closer to his artistic crystallization of the “pole of nature,” exemplified in his mind by the image of his mother and eventually by Eve, the “primal mother.”

Related to these love-thematics is the stark reality and insuperable dominance of death, which Goldmund seeks to conquer by love. Both protagonists discuss the topic of death and confront it, each in his own manner: Narcissus seeks to exist in a timeless realm of the spirit that in itself is a preparation for death, while Goldmund, hearing in his heart but dreading “the wild song of death,” abandons himself to life and love. Sensing this to be an unsatisfactory modus vivendi in the light of the transitory nature of everything human, yet unable to accept Narcissus’s way as his own, Goldmund eventually discovers in art his answer to death: “When, as artists, we create images or, as thinkers, seek laws and formulate thoughts, we do so in order to save something from the Great Dance of Death, to establish something that has a longer duration than we ourselves.” Goldmund dies in peace, having returned to the monastery not as an ascetic, but as an artist.

The underlying idea or conception of art personified in Goldmund is Hesse’s own, at least in that it represents his personal ideal. That this ideal is in essence a Romantic one is clear if one outlines the narrative trellis on which the Goldmund character is strung: He represents the vital vagrant who, by dint of a wealth of contacts and experiences, is impelled (if only temporarily) to recede from the din of life in order to internalize, incubate, and finally express what he has encountered in the Orphic creation of a new and timeless work of art. It is in a certain sense true, therefore, that the Hesse who published from 1898 to 1930 never went beyond Romanticism, beyond this conception of the self as the font of meaning and progenitor of all art. This explains as well why realistic fiction was of little importance to Hesse; if literary art is conceived of as an array of self-reflecting mirrors, then exterior reality can be of only secondary or even tertiary significance. It is to Hesse’s credit that he came to see that such self-preoccupation was tantamount to irresponsible self-paralysis, and that this l’art pour l’art approach was abandoned in his final novel.

Shortly after Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, his The Journey to the East appeared, in 1932. The novel is another experiment in narrative technique and setting and is perhaps the most esoteric of Hesse’s works. In many ways, this story of “H. H.”—of his acceptance into an Order, his participation in a “journey to the East,” and his defection and eventual return to the fold—prefigures the dynamics andthematics of Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, published in 1943. The latter took eleven years to compose and is considered by many critics to be Hesse’s most substantive novel, his magnum opus, which recapitulates but also modifies all that preceded it.

The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game is a modified bildungsroman about Josef Knecht, whose surname means “servant,” and is seen by some critics as Hesse’s response to the quintessential German novels of education, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels (the surname meaning “master”). Hesse’s novel contains three chief divisions: an introduction describing the history of the “glass bead game,” characterized as “the quintessence of intellectuality and art, the sublime cult, the unio mystica of all separate members of the universitas litterarum”; the middle section, which outlines the life of Josef Knecht; and finally an appendix, consisting of some of Knecht’s supposed posthumous papers.

The novel is set in the twenty-fourth century in a “pedagogical province” called Castalia, in which, in at least quasi-monastic fashion, an elite group dedicates itself to the life of the spirit and the highly developed glass bead game. The latter has evolved in the course of time from a relatively simple game played on an abacus frame into a complex interdisciplinary exercise combining quantitative and theoretical knowledge from various disciplines with symbology and meditation. Knecht becomes a master game-player, the magister ludi and head of the Order. Gradually, however, inspired partly by his conversations with a brilliant Benedictine monk by the name of Pater Jakobus and partly by his own nagging feelings of responsibility to the world at large, Knecht’s reservations about Castalia and its life of utter aestheticism grow to the point that he resigns his post and leaves the rarefied realm he seemed destined from his very youth to lead. Three days after doing so, however, he drowns by accident in an icy mountain lake.

Hesse’s final novel is many interesting things, not the least of which is a very clever roman à clef, the name games and onomastics of which can occupy one inclined to puzzle over them for some time. More significantly, however, the work represents a personal breakthrough for Hesse, since in Knecht one is at last presented with a Hessean protagonist who attempts to overcome his paralytic self-enclosure and accept some notion of social responsibility. Theodore Ziolkowski has suggested that this gesture, represented clearly by Knecht’s decision to leave Castalia and commit himself to something practical, was not Hesse’s original intention, but that the imminent outbreak of war forced Hesse to abandon his initial literary and aesthetic ideal while writing the second section of the novel. This is more than plausible, and it would explain as well the book’s narrative shift regarding the depiction of Castalia.

A stylistic comparison of The Glass Bead Game with Hesse’s earlier works reveals that language has been given less attention in this final novel, the result in part of the work’s heavy freight of theoretical and philosophical ideas (ranging from a theory of music to intellectual concerns of various kinds). Indeed, Josef Knecht is even less a flesh-and-blood persona than are Hesse’s customary protagonists.

As to the glass bead game itself—described in length but always in somewhat nebulous terms—it appears clear that it symbolizes the attempt on the part of some to achieve an integrated synthesis of what is good or salvageable from the fragmented debris of modern civilization. In this respect, Hesse’s last novel marks a fitting conclusion to a lifelong quest for spiritual wholeness.