For Madmen Only! A Write up on Steppenwolf - Part 2

Posted by Bhaanu at 12:11 AM 0 comments

Caught between two ages, this man's lost all his bearings, his values don’t stand for much in this time and era. This miffed being is far too given up that he should ever be understood, even by himself. Magic begins when he finds how easy a young girl finds it not only to understand him, but to foretell and forestall him. In between he magically comes across a book titled “Treatise on the Steppenwolf”, which is more or less his own story and mentality put into perspective for him. It enkindles his realizations that there may be more than just two extremes (the wolf and the man), but countless number of souls in every individual and that how Asiatics with their meditation techniques were able to get rid of the very illusion of personality, and in their sagely ways attained ultimate freedom, the Nirvana.

The book talks about a magic theater. Purified with much suffering gained from everything that surrounds him and detached with his surroundings as a result –an alien- subconsciously pushed to find timeless and purest forms of happiness, he shall find it in loosing his two selves, his all selves, all that he stands for, learning to laugh at what he cries about, and above all in love. He’s always had visions of this pure happiness but could never really hold on to them. He finds it with the help of the magic theater, admittance to which is allowed only to the madmen.

Thru with the book and not without a few hiccups he finally gains admittance to the magic theater. Having gotten entrance, in tranced settings, he finds in the labyrinths of the theater numerous doors variedly titled like “Marvelous taming of the Steppenwolf”, “All girls are yours”, “How one kills for love”, and “Harry’s Execution”, each making him encounter a bit of himself to burry hatches with and move on freed from that part, that self. In the exploits of the Steppenwolf the book stretches your own imagination to an extent that border on straining it, it amplifies echo of your sufferings in those of the Steppenwolf and it finds his and your redemption in corridors of the magic theater which you yourself would gleefully enter even though its gate says entry “only for the madman”, it is a masterpiece from the Noble laureate writer Hermann Hesse, and a must read for all who believe in taking a pause once in while to reflect upon 'it all'.

Steppenwolf
A masterpiece from Noble laureate writer Hermann Hesse.
Look Hesse up in Wikipedia.
His Autobiography at Nobelprize.org

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For Madmen Only! A Write up on Steppenwolf - Part 1

Posted by Bhaanu at 1:27 PM 6 comments

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

Let me finish please >>