SOURCE: “Paths to the Future,” in Hermann Hesse's Futuristic Idealism: The Glass Bead Game and its Predecessors, Herbert Lang/Peter Lang, 1973, pp. 45–53.

In the following excerpt, Norton examines the future as a significant component of idealistic projection in Hesse's writing.

Hesse's novels of the 1920's and early 1930's—Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, and Journey to the East—continue to draw the consequences of the new outlooks which arose from his personal crisis of the war years. Like Demian they focus on the problems of the creative individual and his way to self-knowledge. At the same time, as also prefigured in Demian, they explore ways to establish relationship with that which lies beyond the individual without compromising his need for distance and perspective in his observation of the world. In this exploration there is movement from the specific to the general and a linking of the temporal with...