Perception of the bourgeoisie in the Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf presents a paradoxical image of the bourgeoisie. The main character, Harry Haller, acknowledges his middle-class upbringing and often has a middle-class outlook on various aspects of society; however, at the same time, he condemns the bourgeois lifestyle and everything it represents due to his perceived alienation from it. The bourgeoisie itself is represented in many different lights in Steppenwolf. The first representation occurs through the character of the nephew of Haller's landlady. The nephew is the most typical bourgeois representation in the novel, and therefore the least explored because he easily adapts to the reader's perceptions without the need for further elaboration. It is the lower middle class who goes to work every day, takes the same short lunch break, goes back to work, returns home and repeats the same unadventurous pattern day after day without ever questioning his role in society or the reason for his existence. The "Treatise on the Steppen Wolf" presents another portrait of Hesse's perception of the bourgeoisie and Haller's relationship with it. Haller is "secretly and persistently attracted to the petty bourgeois world" (50) just as he is to jazz music which "as much as [he] hated it, had always exercised a secret fascination on [him]."(37) Because "yes always settled among the middle classes", he had become accustomed to seeing society "in a completely bourgeois way". (51) The treatise describes being "bourgeois" as seeking balance between two extremes "at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling that an extreme life offers." (51) In this sense, Haller himself is bourgeois because he constant…middle of the paper…understands this and decides to “be a better hand in the game” (218). one day he will join Pablo and Mozart who are waiting for him in this magical kingdom free from bourgeois conventions. “Teaching him to laugh [was] the purpose” (177) and is the only true suicide of the steppe wolf and the bourgeois self because “he doesn't do well with the razor.” (178) Only laughter can free the thousand facets of his soul. Works Cited Boulby, Mark. Herman Hesse: his mind and art. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967Hesse, Hermann. Steppe wolf. Trans. Basil Creighton. Ed. Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz. New York: Henry Holt and Company Ltd., 1990 Wegener, Franz. Herman Hesse's theory of National Socialism in "Steppenwolf". Trans. Laura Campbell, Werner Habel and Eva-Maria Stuckel. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/8444/steppenwolfeng.html (visited: 99/01/30)