Beneath the Wheel proscribes teachers as the enemies of genius, but a strong thread of reverence for the teacher and scholar runs on throughout Hesse, culminating in the reverence for the sages of The Glass Bead Game. Again, the bourgeois, his material possessions and pretensions—the conventional bourgeois which Hesse would have become had he completed his schooling—is constantly reviled; and yet the bourgeois life-style (while he is A Guest at the Spa or is Moving to a New House) is something he resists only by recording his doubts about it. And then, while much of Hesse's lyrical and fantastic writing is a hymn to the pleasures of the solitary imagination, the world of child-like dreaming, the other side of the coin is a lamentation at loneliness, a bitter sense of the isolation felt by the creative artist. Two sides to every question are constantly there: the background which the young Hesse rejected is always invisibly pulling him back. He cannot give full answers to the great questions in mystical terms because there is something puritan, rational and down-to-earth in his personality which prevents a final surrender to nonsense.

This dimension of conflict in Hesse provides nothing so simple as a solution, a panacea, for the "alienated youth". What it does provide is something more like a faithful mirror of some current crises of belief, offering individual readers varying degrees of identity with characters—or mostly one recurring character—in states of acute confusion and doubt…. Beneath the Wheel, Gertrude, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf allow the rebels, the lonely, the questing dreamers, and the conflict-ridden to observe their own perplexities and dilemmas and conclude that they are a rational, not a neurotic, response to a society which has its values wrong. Which they are; but Hesse's formulations are more of a consolation to the individual than a set of answers for society as a whole. (pp. 104-05)

[Hesse's writings remain] a comfort to the alienated rather than any kind of spur to action. Part of the reason for this lies in the very great skill—apparent in these Autobiographical Writings as elsewhere—with which Hesse modulates between the real world and the world of dream and fantasy: one feels, in reading him at his best, that concrete, objective reality and solipsistic dreaming do actually relate and connect; Hesse never entirely leaves the ground. This makes the kind of escape-route he provides very convincing. Machine-civilisation, the pursuit of material goals, the multifarious awfulness of modern living can be rejected because Hesse succeeds in making it appear that there is another, better kind of world in existence alongside it; something objectively there, and attainable. But in fact it is no less of a fairy-tale world than any other.

Hesse strove, and managed, to refine away the worst things of life in writings, often of great purity, eloquence and readability, which make this personal dream world very plausible. The autobiographies (written in no particular order over half a century) provide an invaluable and fascinating complement to all that one guesses of this process from the novels—which are mostly, themselves, autobiography very thinly disguised…. The principal effort in these partial accounts of passages of his life—they are not literal accounts, not factual in detail and certainly not frank self-examinations—is to replace the ordinary world and its tedious demands with a less tawdry, more serene, more acceptable one. As in the novels, he succeeds in conveying a sense of the possible existence of such a world—that is, its existence in an attitude of mind—even if he cannot prove it and reach it. The immaculate, pellucid prose, the pure, austere accounts of his experiences somehow contain it. (p. 106)

In his writings, the "pattern of language stuff, of language yarn" contain the secret; they do possess that "immeasurable worth" greater than "the measurable worth of the content." It is, very simply, that the serene style (concealing ugly episodes, tensions and self-doubtings), the careful selection (and rejection) of detail, the measured, dignified treatment of his small range of themes is in fact all. There are no answers, no solutions: only the posing of a series of questions which similar self-doubters could understand, appreciate and derive consolation from because Hesse had asked them in ways which helped to make them valid. His widespread latter-day influence may not exactly have been invigorating; but it has, in its mild way, been positive and beneficent, a gentle, discerning, eminent minor writer's critique of a real world which has moved farther and farther from the ideal which he imagined himself to be defining. (pp. 106-07)