[The stories in Pictor's Metamorphoses and Other Fantasies are] generically linked to a specific narrative medium, namely the fantastic. This rubric ought not disarm the reader; for Hesse, the fantastic is not an escapist mode for solipsistic flights of the imagination. Rather, many of the themes that problematize his other works surface here just as compellingly. The conflict between life and mind in modern man's soul, the situation of the intellectual and artist in a highly restrictive and hostile environment, man's union with nature, rebellion against bourgeois philistinism—these are characteristic themes in Hesse's writings that also impact on the fantastic mode. The form he adopts in Pictor's Metamorphoses, the fairy tale and the legend, simply constitutes an extended metaphor of the way he envisions and confronts these themes.
The nineteen stories presented in this volume vary vastly in their individual plots, e.g., the artist and the objective world, religious hypocrisy, nature contra technology, the individual and the political state, psychology and dream; still, they are held together by a recurrent leitmotif, the alienation of man from his true self, a theme typical of Hesse depicting man's loss of an original state of primitive innocence through the process of civilization. By turning to the idealized realm of fairy tale and legend, Hesse is able to exercise greater aesthetic freedom in creating an ethical and spiritual goal to which man, denatured by the ravages that a disjointed reality has made on his soul, may aspire.
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