What I expected

>what I expected
coping with loneliness and not fitting in with the world
>what I got
dude just be a hedonist lmao

get over it normie

>What I expected
Poignant narrative dealing with ascetic loneliness from one of Germany's best
>What I got
Tediously juvenile insight from the guy who wrote Siddhartha

>Tediously juvenile
This probably sums up a lot of my feelings here. The writing was nice, but the "message" seemed pretty pedestrian and not very creative. It was basically "live life for pleasure" but dressed up in literary devices.

Okay, so I very seldom post on Veeky Forums and I'll cop to being a brainlet. I'm going to ask a question and you're all going to immediately dismiss me as a troll, but I assure you I just want my (probably stupid) question answered.

Will reading Steppenwolf give me a better appreciation for the villain of 'Justice League'? The character was pretty lame and underdeveloped. I assume he must have some connection to the novel.

Thank you for honest answers.

Prelude to Steppenwolf is actually better than the entire book

It's not good for coping, it's more like every incels dream. His whole "coping" is built upon luck, that some beautiful girl showed extreme interest in him.
Not very likely and not any real help.

You guys are either pretty dense or the English translation sucks in some way.

The book does not say, become a hedonist, endd of story.
Have you actually read all the parts about the diversity of a human being and the importance of not letting some parts of it go to waste? Have you understood that it is important that Haller felt out of place beforehand?

This book is a lot more complex and a lot better than you think or say it is.

God Veeky Forums is terrible now

In other words, you projected your own situation onto the novel, and were somehow surprised that it wasn't about that.

>His whole "coping" is built upon luck, that some beautiful girl showed extreme interest in him.
She isn't real FFS. She's his feminine complement, or Anima. Even her name is a clue (what's the author called again?)

You're not wrong.

Forced Jungian bullshit is embarrassing and just further devalues the novel

dude wtf are you on about

This boy is right. Steppenwolf is great.

you're a mongoloid

>diversity is good, don't think too much, open borders now!

No wonder Germany is in such a shit state today

Animas and leprechauns don't exist son

You really are a mongoloid.

Neither do half of the events in the novel, you bell-end.

i lik the part where he dresses up and acts like a fake intellectual at his old professor's dinner party but then storms out because of fake Goethe icon

>Will reading Steppenwolf give me a better appreciation for the villain of 'Justice League'?
Certainly not lol.

He enjoyed poetry and the classics, although he was lonely.

She liked him and wanted him to go dancing. They danced and I presume his life was much more fulfilling.

That's about all I remember from this one.

>novel specifically deals with a "tfw to smart for plebs everything is black-or-white" teenager and his emergence from the cocoon of pseudointellectual edginess and autism
>dude lmao
Is it even possible to be more of mouth breathing retard without any self-awareness whatsoever?

>animas don't exist
Really? Have you never projected an idea of perfection onto someone or fallen in love with the idea of someone?
Whatever you want to call it that shit is real.

read the book a long time ago, didn't he leave because of some alt-right pepe meme his professor posted on twitter which made him ragequit?

it was some meme about accepting different incompatible parts of yourself and expressing them all or something like that maybe

This is why Hesse says Steppenwolf is the most misunderstood of his books.

Its a book for adolescents.

This, the novel in no way shape or form is calling for a hedonist life style, rather an he is made to accept things he once scoffed at as being useless, such as dance and jazz. The realm of the intellectual makes room for the realm of the physical and emotional.

siddharta and damien are for adolescents, steppenwolf is for plebish 50 year olds

why all the murdering and gore though?

What the fuck are you on about. How is Hermione "perfect", stop listening to horoscope tier gobbledygook and think critically for a minute

Veeky Forums: Wtf I hate Steppenwolf now!

>juvenile
>pedestrian
It's always fun to spot brainlets who first started "serious" reading in their twenties and complain about Bildungsromane for teenagers not being sophisticated philosophical treatises.
>guy who wrote Siddhartha
Literally the absolute worst from Hesse by every metric. Stop being a turbopseud.

>Bildungsromane for teenagers

Hesse specifically says in the preface its not intended for young men you fucking retard

He most certainly doesn't. You're welcome to prove me wrong, though.

You just fucked up son

>salty author's note thirty years after publication complaining about children failing to comprehend
>hur he said it's not for teenagers in preface
Okay, bubbah.

Alright you got me there. The point is Hesse explicitly thought it was 2deep4u

And Moliere thought himself a much better tragedist than comedist. And Rupi Kaur no doubt thinks herself modern day Yeats. Point being: it is in fact an exemplary coming-of-age novel and it's no more sensible to look for some deep enlightenment in this work than it is to criticize Winnie-the-Pooh for not dealing with deterritorialization or struggles of the working class.

thats what the anima is

In the end I capitulate and I'm sorry. I stuck you for authors dumb intent but you're totally right

Read some Jung and STFU. Because your ignorance of him is the reason you don't get Steppenwolf.

Oh no I get it, I just think its really dumb

please elaborate

I find the notion of anima a useless and deluding concept. What it registers as "perfection" of an "ideal" is so broad and ambiguous that it serves only to undermine an imminent reading of characters with all their potential imaginative dimensions with a schematism that only a priori suggests the significance of associations that are ultimately merely contingent to the schema itself with all the loaded biases that went into its construction.

Essentially its worst type of literary theory where you stop reading the work itself and get distracted into a self referential symbolic system which serves only to narrow your experience rather than expand it. The fact Hesse himself shoehorned in such symbolism only serves to highlight its circular-logic

ok, all of you animist jungian fucks, what was the point of the murder?

The confirmation bias is strong with this one.

I bet you can see a jewish complot in a jar of peanut butter.

There was no 'point'. Read the dialogue that follows.

Hellfire, have you guys actually read the fucking thing?

bro...what is your angle

>the point is there was no point

It's not a fucking literary theory

I'm being generous, you're right its pseudo-mysticism

don't remember much, was a couple of years ago, not much interest in reading it again

Okay. You read it, you apparently didn't like it, you don't remember it and you don't intend to reread it.

Why the fuck are you here?

i liked it though, i just don't remember much from it

Whatever dude its obvious you have no idea what you're talking about

...

>Bildungsromane for teenagers
Why the fuck is there a YA book on the lit 100?

Where did you derive hedonism from this at all?

The true nature of the ending is based on a world of intellectual ideals, perspectives, opinions, and assumptions crashing down hard on the ego.

This is about the proud lonely individual aka "The Special Snowflake" getting absolutely btfo'd by the sheer awe and overwhelming multiplicity of the universe crashing down on him. It's message is based on stop making assumptions about who you are, who other people are, what the world is like, what you think you know.

So you're saying you should try sucking black cock just once instead of assuming you wouldn't like it
Hmm interesting

I'm already gay, but I think you should not assume that I wouldn't fuck your mother until I gave you 5 more brothers.

>I'm already gay

Then you have zero credibility talking about whether something is hedonistic you self consumed loser

>M-MUH HEDONISM, STOP HEDONISM.

Does your simple bird brain always entice you shout words you think have true meaning and wit without context? You are the kind of person that takes words and rapes them into uselessness because you think you are actually making some sort of point. You have no point. There is not one excerpt in the book that implies hedonism is the true answer. There are passages in the book that imply The Steppenwolf is being enticed and torn between two contrasting ideals, but he is thrown into disarray. You truly think an author so inspired by eastern philosophy and spiritualism would be that stupid to take one side and stick with it? He's implying even dualism is incomplete and missing the point.

Your life has zero meaning

Because it's a great YA book.

>the power of /pol/yp intellectuals
Kek.

I like this post

Its all thats needs be said. Pleasure and "experience" on their own terms are ultimately nothing but an a priori defined void. With nothing inside them but the pre-determined writhings fit only for a sub-sapien horrorshow.
Homosexuality being the most purest example of its logic played to fruition, as you bump your way from one languid pseudo-relation to the next from cradle to grave.

You want to promote self sacrificing to the ambiguity the novel promotes but its a dialectical dead end, and the exact one the people of Germany knew when he was writing this shit before they flung faggots like you into the furnace

>stop taking all your assumptions for truisms
>immediately responds with a prepackaged cookie-cutter edgy /pol/ straw man
pristine clayware
vacate the board, underage

The presentation was moreso stop trying to construct anything. Stop trying to define a meaning in yourself that you actually stand to live by. The time of narratives and identity is over. Accept the semiotic void of modern life

Suck nigger cocks is the perfect summary of it

>most purest

I'm not the gay user, friendo. Merely laughing at you getting rekt and resorting to pure unadulterated ad hominem. Also putting your basic bitch "muh degeneracy muh ebil relativism" pol-shittery in quasi-intellectual flowery verbiage doesn't in fact make it any less stupid or pathetic. Just exposes your brainletism even more. Now run play in the meme thread and "win" arguments by regurgitating pseud non-sense on your dedicated brainlet board.

>Doing exactly what you're currently trying to criticize someone for

And not an argument was found that day

>The presentation was moreso
Feels like that episode of Friends where the dumb one found automatic thesaurus replacement on a laptop.
>Stop trying to define a meaning
That's your retarded leap of logic strawman. The point of Steppenwolf is not to abandon all narratives, but not to exclude the ones you currently hold from critical assessment and reevaluation.

>not an argument
There's no need for a counterargument when there hasn't been any argument in the first place, brainlet.

The two propositions are one and the same. Meaningful conceptions of ones life and self are not free to be combined and swirled about without like so many colors of paint turning into a garish grey-brown pulp. Just as you can't be someone worthy of dignity and respect from God while being a literal human shit eating homo. The discovered pamphlet that Harry finds makes this situation clear, Hesse sees a project of meaning as a useless and nauseating wreckage. All well and good but I wont be told by some genderqueer munter that its not then a clear giveway to hedonism as Harry was in the end nothing but a cucked and drugged gimp and told it was good for him

You are completely missing the point. Steppenwolf is the deconstruction of the ego, not necessarily the deconstruction of political and cultural narrative, but the political and cultural narrative oneself begins to hold sacred and true as a justification of false individuation and self-righteous alienation from the rest of the world.

And these comes from a means not of "void" or bleakness, but of the beauty, the incomprehensibility of the universe, Hesse is trying to bring eastern spirituality in the context of western psychology and philosophy.

>Steppenwolf is the deconstruction of the ego, not necessarily the deconstruction of political and cultural narrative

In what fucking universe are these not one and the same. The Ego is the core of all Western Civilization. The Ego is absolutely everything.
Deconstruct it all you like but don't act as if it isn't a flagrent disavowel of all that was once held as significant and worth living for in Western thought

>Your life has zero meaning
>the exact one the people of Germany knew when he was writing this shit before they flung faggots like you into the furnace
>muh life has no meaning
having actually read Mans search for meaning I can tell you you've fallen for a meme, you're mimicking the same whinge made by plebs who don't know who they are and you don't actually believe a word you say but you are unable to articulate anything else having never had an encounter with God and discovered who you are

> you bump your way from one languid pseudo-relation to the next from cradle to grave.
if you can't find meaning in this then I'm sorry you were born wired wrongly, maybe in the next life you will find out who you are

>you self consumed loser
who else is there to consume? still don't know who you are?

>having actually read Mans search for meaning

lmao
My friend you know absolutely nothing

>The two propositions are one and the same.
They're not. Being self-aware and able to reflect upon your own worldview is not in any way equal to "abandon all narratives". Stop trying to shoehorn everything into your meme knowledge and drag it down to poltardian shitflinging.
>Meaningful conceptions of ones life and self are not free to be combined and swirled about
They most certainly are. Everyone's weltanschauung is necessary a composition of views from different ontological paradigms. People aren't just sole ideology fueled robots despite what your years on /the_pol/ have taught you.
>The discovered pamphlet that Harry finds makes this situation clear, Hesse sees a project of meaning as a useless and nauseating wreckage.
This only makes clear that you haven't read the book.
>further impotent poltardian rage
Okay.

I'm not reading that shit. Compose a coherent paragraph like an adult

I've tolerated your clumsy attempts at larping as an intellectual with needless purple prose so far, so do oblige.

No fuck off with your reddit vivisection

>appeal to 'capital W' Western Something
Why do you keep shitting up my board, based pede?

>I am unable to substantiate my autism or debate rationally
>let's criticize form/grammar/semantics and call him reddit
Next time just post a frog and something about degeneracy, pointless shitstain.

>a board de facto dedicated since creation to upholding and investigating the Western Canon
>Why won't /pol/ go away with their problematic words like selfhood and Western thought!

Don't mind if I do

What did he mean by this?

>"b-but X is le core of Western Civiliaztion!!1"
I know public schooling might not have taught you this, but that doesn't in fact constitute an argument. Also surmising that extraneous societal phenomena in realms of politics and culture are innate part of individuum's ego just screams maximum retardation.

What else but commitment towards the ego seperates Western thought from other civilizations?
Its rooted right down to the quest of Odysseus, right through to the Cartesian mind to the origins of the novel itself with Robinson Crusoe. The might and scorn of Ahab. The human-God Christ with his feet walking upon Englands mountains green. The ego is absolutely everything without a stern commitment to it we are absolutely nothing. Brought back down to our simean foundations in a swarming pile of niggers.

>repeating what I already said with vaguely related imagery will surely make my non-argument logically coherent
Not your board of impressionable teens, friendo. Funny you would go on to play retarded word games about commitment to self and bring up Greeks and Cartesians when Aristotle and Descartes had rather different metaphysical concepts of selfhood and as such that would already constitute historical "non-commitment" in your pseud tirade where you conflate individualism and immutability of beliefs. Also great job not addressing your retardation about political and cultural realities being innate to individuals. Maybe read some more and come back when you have any actual arguments instead of exuding pointless sophistic.

I took it as the realization of an individual that everyone is alone, that these issue we think are our own aren't and that one man's method isn't exactly the other.
Lets look at the characters here. First we have the Steppenwolf, a man obsessed with the past and lost in nostalgia. He's a man who can't understand hedonism and in fact goes against. He goes against social interaction and is, almost to a t, an individualist.
Next we have Hermine. She is the definition of social. She knows everyone, she loves to dance, she loves to be lost in crowds. She only cares about the present, only about the moment. I suppose in a way you could call her a hedonist, but in reality in was different.
We have these two opposite people, these people who love completely different things, and yet we see them connect unlike any other. We see them even start to love one another with the Steppenwolf bring Hermine introspection, and Hermine bringing him social interaction. It's individualism vs communalism, two opposite ideals. And yet, even with all this clash, they are nearly the same character. I mean look at them, they have the exact same worries, the exact same fears, the exact same opinions. Both are suicidal, both are looking for comfort and true connection, and neither can find it.
I took the message to mean we are all the same, no matter how hard we try to hide it under 'intellect' or 'art' or 'fashion' or any number of labels that make us feel better about ourselves. I feel like the ending sequence only doubled this down with the war between nature and machines pushing the same point. Nobody cared what side they were on, they just wanted to fight. And the sequence with all the woman? It was a statement on what humanity gives to each other, how different and yet how similar and necessary we all are.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought the imagery was wonderful, and I took the book to mean more than just 'lol hedonism'. I guess we all see it differently though.

>Y-yeah well you're wrong because I say so and your views are problematic

Back to reddiit Schlomo. Your game is up

You can just admit you don't know what he's talking about. Everyone here sees through you.

>Leprechaun s don't exist
The An Sí live in mounds and trees, they most certainly do exist

'Justice League' guy here again.

I'm stuck (unsurprisingly). According to /co/ the 'Steppenwolf' character is indeed inspired by the work of Herman Hesse, but has vary little to do with the novel 'Steppenwolf'. It was suggested to me that the character was actually inspired by 'Siddhartha', Hesse's fictional account of the life of Jesus. Hesse apparently portrays Jesus as a jewish militant, prone to violence. I have some serious doubts about Christianity, but at the same time I'd rather not read anything that's deliberately offensive or sacrilegious. I figured that most of you posting in this thread have read enough Hesse to tell me whether or not the book's any good.

So, Is 'Siddhartha' worth reading? Thanks in advance.

It's good but Jesus definitely wasn't portayed as a militant in the novel

>Siddhartha
is Siddhartha supposed to have anything to do with jesus? he seems a simple modern enlightened hedonist not interested in saving anyone or preaching anything

the book is breddy gud though, so yeah read it

aside from that, my favorite "fan-fiction" of jesus was on Master and Margarita

>is Siddhartha supposed to have anything to do with jesus?
It was actually inspired by the accounts of his early days on his path to enlightenment, you can find it in them in the bible

Sounds incredibly gay and pathetic.