Symbolism In Siddhartha

Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, was written to follow the path of a young man who is on a spiritual journey of self-discovery surrounding the time of the Buddha. Many themes can be taken away from this novel. The story has three main messages to be considered. The first of these focuses is Mortality; the book does a lot to try and explain the matters of life and death. The second is love; the story helps to explain the pressures and hardships of love under challenging circumstances. Final Hemann Hess ties all of the books together with the nature of spirituality. He uses all of these themes to challenge the characters in not only the book but also the readers to help them on their journeys surrounding mortality, love, and spirituality. Overall these …show more content…
An example of this may be symbolism, Indian and Asian literature use objects, characters, and situations are used to represent ideas or concepts. A view of this approach used in Siddhartha is the story of the River. This river that is alluded to in the novel is representative of the life of Siddhartha. There are made up characters to go along with the idea of the river like the ferryman. The purpose of the ferryman is to guide Siddhartha in the right direction, but the main thing leading Siddhartha, in the end, is itself the river. The ferryman is supposed to represent all the teachers that Siddhartha had. This idea is explained really well in the novel though, on page 87 it states, "The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth...in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future...Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man are only separated by shadows, not through reality...Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence." This quote helps to show