![]() ![]() With her help, he explores totally different sides of his personality: sex, jazz, dancing the foxtrot, taking drugs, and finally entering the “Magic Theatre”, a place where he can explore all the different sides of his personality in full. Haller is on the verge of suicide when he meets Hermione, a young woman who reminds him of his childhood friend Hermann Hesse. ![]() ![]() His binary concept of a human spirit struggling with a wolfish, animalistic body is a gross simplification that has caused much of his anguish.Īfter that, we’re back to the notebooks, which form the bulk of the book. In particular, the central fact of Haller’s identity-that he feels torn between his human side and his wolfish nature-is revealed to be a “simple, brutal, primitive formula.” In fact, the tract claims, Harry Haller is made up of innumerable different selves, not a mere two. This is a cold, abstract treatment of his character, in which a lot of the claims he has made are ruthlessly taken apart. In the course of the events described in the notebooks, Haller comes across a strange tract called “On Steppenwolf”, which forms another section of the novel. Then we move on to the notebooks themselves, subtitled “For mad people only.” It’s a detached view of Harry Haller from the perspective of his landlady’s nephew, an apparently sensible, conventional young man who gives a sensible, conventional view of the notebooks he’s found in Haller’s room. We start with an “Editor’s Preface”, which is actually part of the novel. ![]() The structure of Steppenwolf is very interesting. ![]()
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