Beneath the Wheel proscribes teachers as the enemies of genius, but a strong thread of reverence for the teacher and scholar runs on throughout Hesse, culminating in the reverence for the sages of The Glass Bead Game. Again, the bourgeois, his material possessions and pretensions—the conventional bourgeois which Hesse would have become had he completed his schooling—is constantly reviled; and yet the bourgeois life-style (while he is A Guest at the Spa or is Moving to a New House) is something he resists only by recording his doubts about it. And then, while much of Hesse's lyrical and fantastic writing is a hymn to the pleasures of the solitary imagination, the world of child-like dreaming, the other side of the coin is a lamentation at loneliness, a bitter sense of the isolation felt by the creative artist. Two sides to every question are constantly there: the background which the young Hesse rejected is always invisibly pulling him back. He cannot give full answers to the great questions in mystical terms because there is something puritan, rational and down-to-earth in his personality which prevents a final surrender to nonsense.
This dimension of conflict in Hesse provides nothing so simple as a solution, a panacea, for the "alienated youth". What it does provide is something more like a faithful mirror of some current crises of belief, offering individual readers varying degrees of identity with characters—or mostly one recurring character—in states of acute confusion and doubt…. Beneath the Wheel, Gertrude, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf allow the rebels, the lonely, the questing dreamers, and the conflict-ridden to observe their own perplexities and dilemmas and conclude that they are a rational, not a neurotic, response to a society which has its values wrong. Which they are; but Hesse's formulations are more of a consolation to the individual than a set of answers for society as a whole. (pp. 104-05)
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