Steppenwolf Analysis

We know that Harry is living in a place where German is spoken, and it's got to be either Austria or Germany because everyone's always griping about the Kaiser (which is the name of the ruler of th...

The narrator of the body of Steppenwolf is none other than the Steppenwolf himself: bet you didn't know wolves could talk, much less write. He's the big, bad wolf in the novel, and pretty much all...

Boys turning into girls turning into boys, a magic theater where any fantasy comes to life… yeah, Hermann Hesse is asking us to believe in some pretty fantastical stuff.Steppenwolf comes from the...

Cheer up, Harry! The narrator of the book is pretty much always down in the dumps, going on and on about how he wants to kill himself and then giving us millions of reasons that he should be unhapp...

The novel plays with what we think a novel should be. It's not exactly a self-contained book that begins and ends when you open and close it. Instead, it's made up of all these weird documents, lik...

Hmm… a book about a Steppenwolf. What should we call it? Aha! Steppenwolf! Eureka!Well, Hesse's thought process may have been a little bit more profound than that, but really the title is pretty...

The epigraph is a line from the book itself, and it comes from the sign over the disappearing door advertising the magic theater. It also shows up when Harry finally gets invited into the Magic The...

After lots of madness and mayhem, Steppenwolf ends up with Harry claiming that he would try out the Magic Theater again someday and do a better job. He declares that someday he "would learn how to...

It ain't easy being a wolf, and it ain't easy reading about one, either. Hesse's novel has enough philosophical meandering to lose you if you're not paying attention. However, the big ideas about l...

A Sad Sack Comes to TownThe narrator's preface sets up the story with all of Harry's weirdness and isolation. We know that something strange is going to happen with this guy who thinks he's a wolf...

Harry is in a bad way, looking for something to excite him in the boring, bourgeois world. He is usually drunk and lonely. Suddenly, one night, he finds an invisible door to a Magic Theater, and a...

In Steppenwolf, Act I lasts from Harry's arrival in the town to when he meets Hermine and she tells him that he must a) love her and b) kill her. Yowch.The preparation for the costume ball (with Ha...

H. H.: Harry Haller is a stand-in for the author, Hermann Hesse, who had his own spiritual crisis and wrote about it in the novel. (Source)Hesse wasn't only an expert with the pen; he was also an a...

Things get pretty wild in Steppenwolf, even if the novel doesn't give us all the juicy details. But with the scandalizing propositions happening left and right, you start to get a good idea of what...

Friedrich Nietzsche: 19th-century German philosopher. (Preface 21, 34, 47, 71, 373)J. T. Hermes, Sophie's Journey from Memel to Saxony: An epistolary novel in six parts from the 18th century. (Pref...