What follows considers the narrative structure and perspective of
Siddhartha in terms of Genette’s structuralist model of narrative analysis. In his “systematic theory of narrative,” Genette emphasizes the difference between the story told and the narrative discourse that is used to tell that story.
1Jonathan Culler, “Foreword,” in Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 7. He introduces five main concepts for analyzing narrative texts: “Order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice.”
2Genette, Narrative Discourse. “Order” concerns the “temporal order of a narrative.”
3Genette, Narrative Discourse, 35. “Duration” points to the difference between “narrative time” (the time span of a story) and “story time” (the “length (of the text measured in lines or pages),” including effects like summaries, descriptive pauses, and ellipses.
4Genette, Narrative Discourse, 35. “Frequency” means how often events are told.
5Genette, Narrative Discourse, 113–60. “Mood” depends on narrative “distance,” that is, the diegetic (told-about) or mimetic (shown) depiction of events or speech and “point of view.”
6Genette, Narrative Discourse, 162–86. Genette calls this “focalization”: “external focalization” (an objective point of view, where the narrative voice gives less information than the characters know); “internal focalization” (a point of view that corresponds to a certain character’s knowledge); “zero focalization” (a distanced, omniscient perspective); and “variable focalization (changing points of view during the narrative).
7Genette, Narrative Discourse, 189–91. Distinguishing voice and perspective helps to analyze the particular narrative setting of Hesse’s
Siddhartha.
The category “voice,” can be used to analyze the “narrating instance”
8Genette, Narrative Discourse, 212. in relation to different “narrative levels.”
9Genette, Narrative Discourse, 227. If the narrative voice belongs to a character, it is “homodiegetic”;
10Genette, Narrative Discourse, 248. if not it is “heterodiegetic.”
11Genette, Narrative Discourse, 248. First-person narratives are “autodiegetic.”
12Genette, Narrative Discourse, 248. Contrary to the idea of a seemingly human narrator, where perspective and narrative voice belong together, one of the benefits of Genette’s model of narrative discourse is that it enables the distinguishing of perspective and the narrative voice, which in turn helps to analyze varying focalizations presented by a stable narrative voice. For Genette, the whole appearance of a text is important. All elements which “enable a text to become a book,”
13Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). including the author’s name and titles. These elements are also important for narrative analysis and interpretation.
Genette’s distinction between narrative perspective and narrative voice is especially useful for analyzing Siddhartha, where a seemingly distanced heterodiegetic narrative voice describes the protagonist’s experiences by repeatedly “zooming in” on his perspective, where narrative distance is reduced by focalizing internally on the protagonist. This specific narrative structure strongly supports the reader’s identification with the protagonist’s constructivist experiential learning.
Siddhartha: Paratexts
Genette considers paratexts, especially titles, central to narrative analysis and interpretation.
14Genette, Paratexts, 76–91. This also applies to Hesse’s
Siddhartha: At least for a German-speaking readership, the novel’s title,
Siddhartha, ostensibly implies that Hesse adapted the historical Buddha’s life story.
15Volker Michels, “Nachwort des Herausgebers: Siddhartha,” SW 3:493. However, the title, “a common first name in India meaning ‘He who has reached his goal,’”
16Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha compiled from ancient records (Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1917), 284. also suggests that everyone can attain this goal, and as such fosters the reader’s identification with the protagonist from the outset. The original German subtitle, “
Eine indische Dichtung,” emphasizes that
Siddhartha is a work of fiction on the one hand, and hagiographic on the other.
17Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha: Eine indische Dichtung (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1922). This ambiguity likely accounts for the varying subtitles in the English translations: the novel is either called
An Indian Tale or
An Indic Poem, or there is no subtitle at all.
18Joachim Neugroschel uses “Indian Tale” in his 1999 translation. I refer to this widely circulating translation in the analyis. In contrast, Rika Lesser’s translation uses “Indic Poem” while Sherab Chödzin Kohn’s translation and Hilda Rosner’s version omit the subtitle. Siddhartha has twelve chapters, which are divided into two parts (Part 1 has four chapters, Part 2 has eight). Hesse dedicates the first part to his friend Romain Rolland, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915, as Hesse did in 1946. The second part is dedicated to Hesse’s cousin Wilhelm Gundert, a scholar of Japanese and Chinese religion and literature, whom Hesse held to be “the one who had penetrated Eastern thought to the greatest degree.”
19Neale Cunningham, Hesse and Japan: A Study in Reciprocal Transcultural Reception (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2021), 49. This second part of
Siddhartha recounts the protagonist’s individual learning experiences and is twice as long as the first part, which underlines the importance of individual experiential learning over institutionalized cultural or religious practices (which are treated in the first part).