Overcoming Suicide

From a narratological point of view, the text of Steppenwolf is multi-layered, which also allows different levels of identification with the protagonist and his pathological story. The first part, the so-called “Editor’s Preface,” is a frame-like introduction to “Harry Haller’s Notebooks,” which constitute the second and major part of the text. The “editor” himself, of course, is a fictitious figure. He is in fact a third-person narrator pretending to have found a manuscript written by Harry Haller, “a man nearing fifty who one day some years ago called at my aunt’s block of flats in search of a furnished room.”3Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. David Horrocks (London: Penguin, 2012), 3. The name “Steppenwolf,” he explains, was used by Haller himself as a metaphor for a lonely, even shy being. The novel thus begins in third person, allowing a distant look at the protagonist (whose initials clearly point to Hermann Hesse’s name), but then turns into a first-person narrative in the “Notebooks,” opening the possibility of a closer identification with a character of nearly fifty years of age (Hesse’s own age during the genesis of the novel), who, suffering from deep depression, decides to commit suicide on his fiftieth birthday. A new shift of perspective follows in the “Treatise,” a socio-psychological treatise on the “Steppenwolf,” a (pseudo-)scientific text found and read by Haller with “constantly increasing suspense at one sitting.”4Hesse, Steppenwolf, 43. Hesse’s other narrative stroke of genius thus consists in interrupting Haller’s first-person singular story in order to offer him, and thus, of course, the reader, a kind of scientific (though rather essayistic) explanation of his mental state: “Harry is not made up of two characters, but of hundreds, of thousands. His life, like that of every human being, does not oscillate between two poles only—say between the body and the mind or spirit, between the saint and the profligate—but between thousands, between innumerable polar opposites.”5Hesse, Steppenwolf, 61. Haller’s psyche is thus torn into a thousand parts, confuting his own simplicist idea of a “division into wolf and human being,” and revealing the roots of his psychological problems in his erroneous concept of the relationship between himself and the world. The tract is a turning point in the novel and lays the foundation for a less stubborn and self-pitying behavior later on, as first steps towards healing.

Haller’s story can be read as a pathology report on a depressed, even schizophrenic psyche susceptible to suicide. However, the novel does not end in tragedy, as Haller’s isolation and depression are gradually broken during a process of social integration mainly initiated by two characters, Hermione and Pablo, representatives of sensuousness and worldly pleasure. The healing process is further realized by the sensual world of (sexual) love and (jazz) music, also by stimulants (opium), reaching its climax in the Magic Theater (“for mad people only”), which corresponds, psychologically speaking, to a journey into the subconscious, or to a deep meditation, during which suppressed emotions and images come to light, causing positive therapeutic effects.6See Baumann, Hermann Hesses Erzählungen im Lichte der Psychologie C. G. Jungs, 230–32. As Hesse later complained (in 1941), many of his contemporary readers misunderstood the psychological and aesthetic experiment with the Magic Theater in the novel, remaining “curiously blind to a good half of its contents,” and failing “to see that a second, higher, timeless realm exists above Steppenwolf and his problematic life.”7Hesse, Steppenwolf, 239–40. For the reader today, this “timeless realm” may indeed lie beyond the story of Harry Haller, in the human psyche and its subconscious energies, which can indeed be self-destructive, but, once understood, can liberate humans from their fears and depression, leading them into the realms of creativity.