This story of a man on the wrong side of 40 living more or less off the grid begins with a narrative that serves as a primer on protagonist’s personality and as an effort to put it in perspective from a bourgeois standpoint. It is in order as point of view of the Steppenwolf -as the man calls him-, which the rest of the book is all about, is not always on the lines of ‘normal’ and might not have found favor with readers had it been foisted upon them straight, something that’s reflected with the narrator’s confession that but for his acquaintance with the protagonist he should have spurned the story himself, in disgust.
The narrator however doesn’t linger after ingratiation and leaves you to freely feel your plights heightened in those of the protagonist.
As you go along you can’t but pity the protagonist- Harry Heller, the Steppenwolf. The wolf in him could never stand whatever that’s bourgeois, or pretty much every thing mundane and worldly, for its “insipid lukewarm airs sickened him”, reflects the narrator. He whished for solitude and was granted. He holds all popular ideas of happiness as gravely flawed, far too much to look over. All happiness is ignorance for him, as they say knowledge is the original sin; “he has developed ingenious boundless capacity for pain”, the narrator observes.
Amidst, however, these bourgeois dwellings of modest means only, the man in him makes his sojourns as plush mansions and overwrought dwellings to the wolf are but totems of culture and age of spiritual blindness, no wonder he is restive and leads a shiftless life.
During his sojourns ‘the man’ is often seen watching over the simple pleasures of bourgeois life, the clean floors, the early rising and all, to which he pays reverence as something that must ever remain unattainable to him. For him happiness was only in the purest of pures like in the music of the great Mozart of his time, who and likes are nowhere to be seen now and thus dejected he lives a slovenly life in his rented rooms. Reposed among anarchic settings and Novalis, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Goethe, all bristled with notes, he is bend on drinking their and his pain “to the dregs”, a way of living that’s but a precursor to dying by means of suicide.
Steppenwolf
A masterpiece from Noble laureate writer Hermann Hesse.
....more on Steppenwolf in second and last part.
Look Hesse up in Wikipedia.
His Autobiography at Nobelprize.org
Indian team made short work of Aussies in their 'own game'. Amidst yet untouched, by all the muck that flew high on this tour, Adam Gilchrist bid adieu to International Cricket. 
