In all of his work Hesse has concerned himself with the individual and his quest for meanings in life. For Hesse the forms of the society which surround the individual are meaningless; therefore, the individual becomes the outsider, the Hessean hero who asks, "How shall I live?"… Although, then, the theme of the outsider underlies much of Hesse's work, there are three novels which, it seems to me, stand out as signposts, marking the direction of Hesse's thinking in terms of an outsider concept, in terms of the nature of such a being. First, Unterm Rad depicts the making of the outsider, the development of his awareness of the social organism and his separation from it, his becoming an isolated cell. In Demian a later stage of the outsider appears: the outsider develops in his isolation, achieves independent life (a stage sometimes known as the break-through). Hesse's "Bible...