These are three photos from my copy of Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. It’s about a guy called Ha
These are three photos from my copy of Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. It’s about a guy called Harry Haller, who, like the guy in Notes From Underground, feels himself violently at odds with a “general society” he’s conjured in his mind, and like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, incorrectly feels like he has insulated himself from the consequences of his attitude through his intellectual pursuits. At the end of the book, he manages to free himself from these self-harming opinions through the judicious application of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. This book was written in 1927, so rock ‘n’ roll hadn’t been invented yet, but what they had instead of rock ‘n’ roll was jazz, and he gets lots of jazz. Most of the book is written as lengthy explorations of how disconnected he feels from the mainstream culture (while feeling very bitter about being forced to engage with it in order to survive, as you can tell from the first image) and his own life. There is also a constant thread of implied menace, without ever stating it directly, from the coming Nazi shitstorm. When he eventually makes it to the “magic theatre” above and pays the price of admittance, it really kicks off into an almost Hunter-Thompson-esque series of frightening visions and nonsensical scenarios involving brutal murders and sexual encounters and so on. I was convinced I had to make a blog post when I came across the words on one of the doors in the magic theatre: COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF SOCIABILITYMan, I am totally in. No further information required. -- source link
#herman hesse#steppenwolf