Character Analysis
The Man
Harry Haller's a loner, a drunk, and pushing fifty. Not too inspiring, right? That's how it looks to his landlady's nephew, too:
His health did not seem good. Besides his limping gait that often made the stairs fatiguing to him, he seemed to be plagued with other troubles, and he once said to me that it was years since he had had either good digestion or sound sleep. I put it down first and last to his drinking. When, later on, I accompanied him sometimes to his haunts I often saw with my own eyes how he drank when the mood was on him, though neither I nor anyone else ever saw him really drunk. (Preface, 24)
Harry's habit is important for understanding him as a character, because being drunk is not some sort of fun-loving party-people activity for Harry. Instead, it reveals him to be an uber-depressed person who is trying to escape from the world. He's more Leaving Las Vegas than Spring Breakers.
But Harry's really smart; he's got a lot of book-learning and is exasperated when other people don't seem to care about culture, ideals, and other intellectual stuff. Once, when he's talking to his friend Pablo, who really couldn't care less about music that is considered "important" or "high-brow," he says:
"Several times I have attempted to talk about music with you. It would have interested me to know your thoughts and opinions, whether they contradicted mine or not, but you have disdained to make me even the barest reply." (347)
You can see the way that Harry is irritated and just doesn't understand why everyone isn't interested in having an intellectual debate with him. Harry's snootiness has to do with his ideas in general about art and culture. At first he believes that any sort of hopeful or popular art is fluffy and useless—he's your classic tweedy, uptight art snob.
But over time he starts to appreciate music not only with his head, but also with his body—he learns to love dancing and sexiness. He also realizes that art that makes you laugh and feel a-okay about humanity is just as valuable as art that leaves you mopey and weepy.
The Wolf
Harry's explanation for his inability to fit into society isn't that he's just a grouch. Oh, no; he's got a lot better, more elaborate excuse. It's that he's part wolf. Try that one next time an authority figure gets onto you for having a bad attitude. "Sorry, teach'. I had to groan when you announced that there would be a pop quiz. I'm part wolf!"
The Wolf part of Harry has to do with his desires to be wild, alone, and outside of society. In fact, he even runs across a book about himself (now that's something that doesn't happen every day) that describes his wolf nature to a T:
What [Harry] had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes. [...]
"And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. [...] In him the man and the wolf did not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. (32-33)
So there's that. Harry feels like the animal part of him, the uncivilized side that doesn't want to conform to society, is at war with the human part that knows all about art and culture and other important smartypants stuff.
The Steppenwolf idea, it turns out, is Harry's fatal flaw. It's what keeps him from realizing that life is actually pretty fun, and (at least according to this book) can be replayed over and over again. The Steppenwolf complex also makes Harry pretty suicidal. Yeah, feeling like he has a wolf inside him makes Harry pretty mopey.
Because Harry thinks he's split into two warring selves, he is blinded by the fact that there are many more souls living inside of him. To take a line from Whitman, this dude contains multitudes (or should we say "multidudes?" Can we make that happen?).
And since he's so focused on the dichotomy of Steppenwolf v. Man, he is ignoring the other types of selves and personalities that he contains.
The Steppenwolf is, in the end, a coping mechanism for Harry to excuse himself for his antisocial behavior. What he's supposed to learn is that if he would just let himself relax a little bit, and see his multitudinous potential, he wouldn't have to cope with the world in such a sad, dramatic way. He could just laugh.
Millions of Little Harrys
In the Magic Theater Harry really gets into some deep self-exploration, because he's got the chance to live out all the missed opportunities in his life and play out all his secret desires.
However, his weakness—which is that he's suicidal—rears its ugly head and causes him to make a huge mess of the Magic Theater. He smashes the magic mirror that had divided him into thousands of versions of himself, then stabs Hermine when he sees her lying naked with Pablo… he could have seen that as an invitation to join them in their fun, for example.
His pal Pablo tells him:
"You forgot yourself badly. You broke through the humor of my little theater and tried to make a mess of it, stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud of reality. That was not pretty of you." (685)
This is Harry's eternal problem: it's all fun and games, and then his serious side has to get out a knife and murder his lover. What a drag. Even though Hermine asked him to kill her, Harry has to ask himself whether it was actually just his own desire—in the café the when Hermine first brings up killing her, Harry had guessed that that was what she'd say. Maybe he somehow influenced that whole conversation with his mind.
Harry finally gets it—that stabbing Hermine wasn't real; in fact, the whole Magic Theater is a hallucination. He has the chance to try again. He decides to do it:
I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game afresh. (688)
This is Harry's big transformation: he realizes that he doesn't have just one life and he isn't locked into being just one self, or into one fight between man and wolf. He has endless opportunities… if he can only learn how to lighten up and carpe the dang diem.
Laugh It Up, Harry
Well, he doesn't quite make it to laughing, but Harry at least figures out that that's what his goal should be by the end of the novel: he should change from Gloomy Gus to Laughing Lou. His aim is "the laughter of the Immortals." What's that, you ask?
First of all, in the strange book that he receives about the Steppenwolf ends with a little statement on how Harry would be different if he could just have some more perspective on life:
Were he already among the immortals—were he already there at the goal to which his difficult path seems to be taking him, with what amazement he would look back to all this coming and going, all this indecision and wild zig-zag trail. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and joy, he would smile at this Steppenwolf. (68)
You know when a kid cries like it's the end of the world because, say, a balloon popped? You, in your infinite wisdom, know that balloons are a dime a dozen and that all you have to do is inflate another one up. No need for crying, right?
But the kid doesn't have your perspective. She is crying because that balloon was one of the only balloons she's ever seen and she's really not sure if she'll get another one. (Also, it was probably loud and scary.)
That's what the treatise is trying to tell Harry: if he could just see things from an eternal, immortal perspective, he would realize he doesn't need to suffer so much over the little things (and the big ones) in his life. Instead, he could smile.
The first night that Harry meets Hermine he dreams about one of his favorite poets, Goethe. He, too, tries to tell Harry to lighten up:
"You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend. You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking." (178)
Now that's the kind of ghost we can get behind. Can we have our house haunted by a few genius, joking ghosts, please? Unfortunately, by the end of the novel Harry still hasn't figured out to laugh like the immortals. He has, however, figured out that he should figure it out: "One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh" (689).
It's like we said before: Harry's no dummy. He just doesn't have much of a sense of humor… yet.
Harry's Timeline