Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse (1927)
“A middle-aged intellectual tears himself apart between his civilized mind and his animal despair — then discovers the split was a lie all along.”
Character Analysis
A forty-seven-year-old intellectual who has diagnosed himself with a split personality — the cultured 'man' and the savage 'wolf.' The diagnosis is accurate as far as it goes, which is not far enough. Harry is not two but thousands, and his insistence on the binary is itself the disease. He is brilliant, suffering, self-absorbed, and capable of genuine tenderness — but only when he stops analyzing his tenderness long enough to feel it. His journey through the novel is from despair through the body to the threshold of humor, a threshold he does not cross but resolves to approach again.
Elevated, allusive, self-consciously literary. References Goethe, Mozart, Novalis in casual conversation. Uses long subordinate clauses and philosophical vocabulary.