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

Mans Struggle with His Identity in Steppenwolf The Christian resolve to find the domain ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. These argon the haggle of Friedrich Nietzsche, among the most influential philosophers of the modern era and one who has exerted an incontrovertible incline on many German authors, including Hermann Hesse. That Hesse should feel drawn to a skeletal frame so tumid in the German consciousness is not suprising, that he should do so in spite of the religious zeal of his family seems closely heretical. No less an influence on Hesse, though, was the groundbreaking psychologist Sigmund Freud, himself also an champ of Nietzsche, and who s everal times said of Nietzsche that he had a more acute knowledge of himself than any other 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 underlying to the personal crises he faced in the years after the blast of World War I. Hesses p ost-1914 cleans reflect his progress through successive self-examinations. Demian, make in 1919, explored his break with conventional morality in a decaying world. Siddhartha, print in 1922, features Hesses lifelong fascination with Eastern spirituality. It was his 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, which first attained a complete break with the past while retaining an overtly autobiographical life amidst otherwise quantity 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 particular and firmly situated within their historical contexts. Further, we are intimately beaten(prenominal) with the characters, with their backgrounds, their tastes, their values, and their fates. And while Kafkas novels are heavily symbolic, we are never theless presented with a total worldview, a worldview we stub consider in all its irony and terror. Moreover, we can identify completely with the characters, who are really only reflections of ourselves, struggling for commentary 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 boarding house Haller resides. We are also inefficient to identify the historical setting for the novel without referring to Hesses own life.