The novel opens with Harry Haller, a man in his late forties, who rents a room in a respectable neighborhood. Barely a year later, this polite but remote and eccentric tenant mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a manuscript detailing his personal travails.

Haller has been trying to escape from the throes of a severe marital and professional crisis. He is appalled by the disintegration of traditional values around him. His solitary existence, at the same time, makes Haller aware of his own divided personality, in which a calm and rational exterior is constantly mocked by streaks of an irrational, wolfish aggressiveness. This seemingly hopeless duality drives him into bouts of depression, anger, and alcoholism.

On his way toward recovery, Haller begins to realize that he contains within him a much richer spectrum of possibilities and that he must allow all parts of his personality to express themselves. Most of all, he is asked to respect and come to terms with those aspects of his self which, up to now, he had simply lumped together as the wolfish side of his character. In the process, he is forced to forgo the deadly seriousness of his mental despair in favor of a more lighthearted tolerance of himself and others.

Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, creates a most memorable vision of cultural pessimism, while still affirming the viability and continuity of the Western tradition. His style, in which a linear development of plot is counterbalanced by scenes of surrealism, allows the reader to view the events with an increasingly humorous detachment, a perspective which not only restates the novel’s theme but also contributes to the continuing appeal of its wisdom.

Bibliography:

Boulby, Mark. “The Steppenwolf.” In Hermann Hesse: His Mind and Art. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. Compares the structure and motifs of Steppenwolf with those of Hesse’s other novels. Discusses how depersonalization becomes an essential element in the solution of Harry Haller’s dilemma.

Casebeer, Edwin F. “Steppenwolf: Siddhartha Today.” In Hermann Hesse. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1972. A Jungian interpretation of Steppenwolf. Sees Hermine as the anima and Pablo/Mozart as the Self of Harry Haller, especially in the Magic Theater dream world that the Self creates to discover its real nature.

Field, George Wallis. “Der Steppenwolf: Crisis and Recovery.” In Hermann Hesse. Boston: Twayne, 1970. Traces the autobiographical element and the development of the humor theme from Hesse’s earlier works into Steppenwolf. Discusses the themes of sexuality, cultural criticism, music, and the transcendence of reality.

Freedman, Ralph. “Person and Persona: The Magic Mirrors of Steppenwolf.” In Hesse: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Posits that Hesse created protagonists as images and distortions of himself to reflect the interplay between self-in-life (person) and self-in-art (persona). Discusses how Jungian psychoanalysis fashioned many of the artistic strategies in Steppenwolf.

Ziolkowski, Theodore. “The Steppenwolf: A Sonata in Prose.” In The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. Focuses on the technical problems of the novel’s structure and explains how Hesse used musical sonata form to shape Steppenwolf.