The Steppenwolf: a wild writing

Abstract

By recognizing that The Steppenwolf , by Herman Hesse, is a work that aims at  subverting the authority of common sense and, consequently, at enlarging the reader’s usual perception, this paper has the objective of showing that such a procedure does not lie in the   defamiliarization caused by the plot, but rather, through the text structural arrangement, in its wild writing which can defamiliarize by making the tension among worldviews more powerful and by demystifying the habitual notion of the untamed nature of man. To do so, two explicit concepts within the novel are considered: one related to the individual and the other one related to the representation; the idea is to demonstrate that it is in the light of such notions that the novel is built and is able, through the aesthetic elaborations of those two concepts throughout the text, to destabilize the shallow comprehension given in the opening dialogue.