Mans Struggle with His Identity in Steppenwolf :: Hesse Steppenwolf Essays

Mans Struggle with His Identity in Steppenwolf The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. These are the address of Friedrich Nietzsche, among the most influential philosophers of the modern era and one who has exerted an incontrovertible influence on many German authors, including Hermann Hesse. That Hesse should feel drawn to a figure so prominent in the German consciousness is not suprising, that he should do so in spite of the religious zeal of his family seems almost heretical. No slight an influence on Hesse, though, was the groundbreaking psychologist Sigmund Freud, himself also an admirer of Nietzsche, and who several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any new(prenominal) man who ever lived or was ever likely to live. This theme, the knowledge of self, is a recurring one in Hesses works, and is central to the personal crises he faced in the years after the outbreak of World War I. H esses post-1914 falsehoods reflect his progress through successive self-examinations. Demian, published in 1919, explored his break with conventional morality in a decaying world. Siddhartha, published in 1922, features Hesses lifelong fascination with Eastern spirituality. It was his 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, which first attained a complete break with the past trance retaining an overtly autobiographical flavor amidst otherwise total abstraction. It is Steppenwolfs break from the past which distinguishes it from the styles of two of Hesses most prominent contemporaries Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. While Mann and Kafka are themselves dissimilar, their novels are characteristic of the novel as a form as totality. Manns novels are intricately detailed and firmly situated within their historical contexts. Further, we are intimately familiar with the characters, with their backgrounds, their tastes, their values, and their fates. And while Kafkas novels are heavily symbolic, we are ne vertheless presented with a total worldview, a worldview we can consider in all its irony and terror. Moreover, we can identify all told with the characters, who are really only reflections of ourselves, struggling for definition amidst ambiguity. Hesses Steppenwolf, conversely, is quintessentially fragmentary. We know little of Harry Haller beyond that which is immediately apparent from the text. We are as the nephew in whose aunts embarkment house Haller resides. We are also unable to identify the historical setting for the novel without referring to Hesses own life.