Third Reading Response

         Halfway through the book, there is another change in tone.  Harry is about to kill himself but after meeting Hermine, his bourgeois counter-part, he willingly and blissfully becomes a slave to her.  She slowly teaches Harry the pleasures of the bourgeoisie lifestyle; primarily dancing.  This tone is lighter and makes the reader want to continue, especially since the last hundred pages where about Harry hating the world and wanting to commit suicide.
         This lighter approach is only a mask for an alarming amount of conflict.  As Hermine teaches Harry to dance, a great sense of hypocrisy arises in Harry.  All of Harry's thinking life he has hated the bourgeois and now all of a sudden he is thick within it...and enjoying it.  He doesn't stop this guilty pleasure because he knows if he does he will kill himself.  The fear of death, before reaching his desired immortality, is also stopping him.  All the while, even as Harry begins to enjoy dancing, he mentions that this happiness is only temporary and he is eventually doomed to a life of depression, which I interpret as foreshadowing for the ever approaching climax.  A much more explicit proof of foreshadowing is when Hermine makes a deal with Harry: "I will save your life, teach you to live, and you will fall in love with me...but in return I want you to kill me".
         I must take a minute to admire the writing.  Hesse has written a point of view that the reader may not have not experienced before, let alone the reader at the time the book was written.  In my opinion this book, especially at this point in the novel is a huge eye opener, and an overall reminder to keep my mind open to all sorts of ideas.  Society itself is just a consensual reality of life, it is not by any means the right reality, or better yet, that there is a right reality at all.  Harry's outside view of society, his disconnection to the 'system', is extremely interesting.