How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #1
It was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related in Haller's manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences. (Preface 43)
The narrator of the preface isn't calling Harry a liar; rather, he's saying that Harry's records are a sort of an art. He created them in order to try to communicate something that is really hard to put into words. Do you think that there are experiences that are impossible to put down into words? Have you ever had one?
Quote #2
He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: "These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of pour present-day life as something far more than horrible, far more than barbarous." (49)
Harry believes that a person is a product of their time, and that the context a person is born into determines the way that they perceive of reality. This is important because at the time that Hesse wrote the novel the world was in a shambles—right after the First World War and right before the Second. Rather than trying to escape and imagine that other times were better or worse, the novel proposes that people live in their own time.
Quote #3
So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait in doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with the air of a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew more and yet less of me than I did myself. (80)
This kind of reminds us of the Great Goethe Picture scandal, where the picture in Harry's mind doesn't match someone else's idea of what the poet looked like. Here, though, the portrait is of Harry himself.
Quote #4
What, however, occupied my thoughts more than all else was the hallucination, or vision, of the church wall. (78)
Steppenwolf is full of tricky moments like these, where it's hard to tell what's real and what's imagined. This is important because, in the end, it doesn't matter whether or not the experiences in the novel are real or imagined. They still have an effect on Harry's life and his understanding of the world, whether they were hallucinated or real.
Quote #5
"There I was, sitting with people as one of themselves and believing that they thought of Goethe as I did and had the same picture of him in their minds as I, and there stood that tasteless, false and sickly affair and they thought it lovely and had not the least idea that the spirit of that picture and the spirit of Goethe were exact opposites." (144)
Getting back to the idea of inexpressible experiences, Harry has an idea of the "spirit" of Goethe, and also his physical appearance. He believes that the two versions should be compatible and reflect each other.
Quote #6
"But in spite of this I know that my own picture of the Savior or St. Francis is only a human picture and falls short of the original, and that the Savior himself would find the picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly reproductions." (208)
Hermine's comment could tell us something about art in general. Is art always a reproduction, or another version of something else? Or can it be valuable in and of itself?
Quote #7
Every day new souls kept springing up beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an illusion my former personality had been. (342)
Forget versions of reality, here Harry has more versions of himself than he can deal with. Are they all "real" versions of Harry, or are some of them invented and influenced by his new friends?
Quote #8
"You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless." (425)
Harry's kind of like a Dungeons and Dragons fan: in his inner mind he's ready for all kinds of battles and adventures. The reality is that he's just sitting around playing cards with his friends.
Quote #9
There were youths, boys, schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played leap frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy and comic, well-dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, long haired and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash, recognized and gone. (509)
Imagine that every age, attitude, and outfit you ever put on was somehow recorded and saved so that there could be multiple versions of you, all of them independent and ready to go off and live their own life. That's what Harry's about to experience in the Magic Theater.