The outsider's basic problem is that he is stuck in a dreary, lukewarm civilization that was created for the “average man,” a culture based on mediocrity.
In Hesse's "Steppenwolf", the hero has temporarily abandoned the dream of the open road, with its elusive prospects of far horizons which always turn out to be as solid and ordinary as a backstreet in one's home town. Hesse is honest enough to acknowledge that a man with a room of his own, a sufficient income, and plenty of books, can still feel as maladjusted as a romantic wanderer. This, I saw, was the main problem: Our odd inability to stay in contact with reality.
Whenever I returned from a few weeks on the open road, I had an odd feeling of strength for a week or two; my home town no longer oppressed me. But the strength would leak away and I would again feel vulnerable and bored. What I wanted to discover was the basic discipline for developing strength and objectivity.
The intensity of the poet's response to existence means that the poet is obsessed by the need for contact with “the source of power and purpose” that lies inside us. All great poets become more spiritual as they attempt to establish contact with this source.
Hesse's Steppenwolf has freedom, in the physical and economic sense; so what is it that he lacks? I knew that if I could answer this question, I would have solved one of the basic problems of the century.
Steppenwolf was Hesse's closest approach to a solution, because it was his clearest statement of the problem. Why had the author failed? It was because he kept looking for his answer outside.
What is wrong with Steppenwolf is that he has no purpose or discipline. He sits in a passive state of mind, waiting to be moved by another's genius. Without external challenge, he ceases to make any effort. He becomes subject to that stringent spiritual law that says the less you put into life, the less you get out of it. The answer had to lie in a sense of inner purpose, and a rigid self-discipline. And so out of these insights I began to fashion the ideas of The Outsider.
-- Colin Wilson, from Three Essays: Hesse, Reich, Borges
