The story is not easily summarized, since it’s much less plot-based than it is a subjective philosophical exploration. The concise version: Harry Haller is a man of about 50 years who was ejected from both his career and his marriage, and who, after traveling the world and tiring of its banal ways, contemplates killing himself on a daily basis. He recognizes two identities within himself: one, a broken, wretched man with a secret fondness for middle-class regularities; the other, a wolf who would like to tear the whole meaningless mess to shreds. With the help of a book Harry finds called the Treatise on the Steppenwolf and, later on, an intriguing woman named Hermine, he soon learns that there is much more to life — and to himself — than he previously thought.

I underlined and tabbed so many pages that I literally have to limit the amount of quotes I list here. But the section that lit me up the most came approximately 150 pages into the novel.

While Hermine is giving a “lesson” to Harry, she says,

“Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours” (p. 151).

On the next page, Hermine says,

“Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”

“Nothing else?” [asks Harry.]

“Yes, eternity.”

“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity? [...] The image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity” (pp. 152-153).

And a bit later, Hermine continues with:

“We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness” (p. 153).

Later in the story, Harry is still struggling to wrap his head around his new experiences. One of Hermine’s friends says,

“It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all” (p. 175).

And finally, a fun quote about art:

“Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy” (p. 193).

As you can see, I got carried away with the quotations. If any of this grabs you, then you should grab a copy of Steppenwolf immediately. But be forwarned, you will not come out of it with a fuzzy feeling in your rumbly tumbly. You are left with the realization that you alone are responsible to navigate the mess of existence. Like they tell Harry about the Magic Theater: “For Madmen Only!”

It’s difficult to explain the point of the book in a short space, but these quotes might help: “It is this irrelevancy of a man’s beliefs to the fate that can overtake him that supplies the most primitive ground for Existentialism, and means that a belief in some sort of providence or destiny is the essential prerequisite of all religion and most philosophy” (p. 112).

“A man becomes an Outsider when he begins to chafe under the recognition that he is not free” (p. 113).

Unfortunately, Wilson consistently turns to the idea of religion as a way out of his dilemma. He doesn’t address the concept of God, but merely the desire to have a system of beliefs by which to live. “The necessary basis for religion is the belief that freedom can be obtained” (p. 113).

“Supposing a solution does exist somewhere, undreamed of by me, inconceivable to me, can I yet hope that it might one day force itself upon me without my committing myself to a preliminary gesture of faith which (in point of fact) I cannot make? The poet finds that he can answer this question with a ‘yes’” (p. 120).

In other words, Wilson is striving to find on outlook on live that is primarily optimistic, and the best way he can do that is to allude to a religious solution. In the meantime, he addresses some of the greatest skeptical and pessimistic literature of the past 150 years, claiming that the ultimate work of modern pessimism is T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Wilson built the foundation of his book on both The Stranger and Sartre’s debut novel Nausea. He then runs through some real life figures like Van Gogh and Lawrence, as well as a multitude of fictional characters and the authors who created them (Hesse, Nietzsche, etc). William Blake gets special attention from Wilson, who asserts that a visionary imagination is the pinnacle of human creativity. However, Wilson never satisfactorily solves his basic problems, and in fact keeps returning to Camus and Sartre throughout the book. He returns to the Stranger for the reason that, no matter how you spin it, life often seems too unreal — and this realization tends to overpower many other philosophies.

I too will have come back to The Stranger — and The Outsider as well — in the near future.