Siddhartha's Journey

Siddhartha’s Journey and Its Reflection of Real Life In Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, the main character, Siddhartha, leaves home in a search for identity and the meaning of life. A journey many people may set out on in their lives and some may succeed. Many however, fail in their quest for truth. Along the way Siddhartha makes several stops, and each stop has a specific relation to his journey. Some are more significant than others, but that is the case in everyone’s life, there are important times of people’s lives and also irrelevant times. In Siddhartha’s journey, each place represents a specific time in his life and also a significant point in his journey. The first step of Siddhartha’s journey comes in the form of the Samanas.
Siddhartha does not actually spend that much time at the river during his first time there and most of its significance comes after his time in the town. It is however important that Siddhartha comes to the same river twice. The time Siddhartha spends in the town is what reflects the period of life when people mature into working adults, and this is exactly what Siddhartha does in the town. He comes to the town knowing practically nothing about how to live in that type of environment, which is very similar to the way people are when they first start living on their own. Siddhartha however has a mentor who teaches him important lessons of life in towns and also lessons of love; this mentor is Kamala, one of the significant characters in the novel. Love is also the first lesson Siddhartha learns when he arrives in town, and is taught to him by Kamala. This lesson also had an underlying message of how much one must give for love, as to learn the lesson Siddhartha had to completely change his life style. Kamala required him to fully integrate into city life, which had a rather steep cost though he only needed to be “in fine clothes, in fine shoes; [have a] scent in [his] hair and money in [his] purse” (Hesse 54). To do this Siddhartha had to get a job and the job he found was with a merchant that worked in the town. During his quest to get
Like many people that live today that return to places they had been before in their lives, Siddhartha also returned to one of these places. By the banks of the river, with his life in the town behind him, Siddhartha would finally find what he had set out to so many years ago. He was now in a peaceful, serene place and was finally able to set his own path and follow it. Before in all other places Siddhartha had been he had been guided, but now he was finally able to guide himself. One of the greatest symbols used in the book was also the river which along with other things also reflected the life of Siddhartha. The river, like Siddhartha, is guided most of its journey but then when it reaches a place it had been before, the ocean, it is able to guide itself for the first time in the journey. At the end of this journey Siddhartha achieves his goal and it is noted by his long friend Govinda that “this smile of Siddhartha was exactly the same as the calm, delicate, impenetrable, perhaps gracious, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha” (Hesse 151). At this point the reader realizes that Siddhartha’s journey has come to a close and right after the novel ends. This reflects real life as when most people reach their overall goal after all the years of being sidetracked and not following the path to get to their goal, their journey is done and the