The protagonist is first introduced in the past tense, in a distanced, heterodiegetic narrative voice that speaks about the protagonist in the third person: “In the shade of the house, in the sunshine near the boats on the riverbank, in the shade of the sal forest, in the shade of the fig tree, Siddhartha grew up—the beautiful son of the Brahmin, the young falcon, together with Govinda, his friend, the son of the Brahmin.”
1Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 3.Thus,
Siddhartha begins with repetition (“in the shade” and “the son of the Brahmin”) and metaphors (e.g., “the young falcon”). This usage sets the tone for the repetitive, figurative narrative style that subsequently pervades the novel and supports the reader’s notion of hagiographic storytelling. Involving repetitions, iterations, many metaphors, and comparisons with nature, this style resembles “the highly stylized, formally structured, extremely formulaic and repetitive, carefully crafted” style of traditional Indian or Buddhist texts.
2Mark Allon, “Early Buddhist Texts: Their Composition and Transmission,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 50 (2022): 523–56. Cf. Also: Ulrich Timme Kragh, “Of similes and metaphors in Buddhist philosophical literature: poetic semblance through mythic allusion,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73, no. 3 (2010): 479–502. Together with the heterodiegetic narrative voice, Hesse’s style creates narrative distance and exoticism. Hesse was familiar with the style of Eastern religious texts and literature. He had read many such texts in Hermann Gundert’s extensive library.
3Hermann Hesse, Letter to Lisa Wenger, February 10, 1921, in Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha,” ed. Volker Michels, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 122. Gundert, Hesse’s grandfather, had worked as a missionary in India from 1835 to 1859 and had translated many local and spiritual Buddhist texts.
4Felix Lützkendorf, “Hermann Hesse in seinen Beziehungen zur Romantik und zum Osten,” in Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha,” ed. Volker Michels, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 78–79. Hesse also had close contact and many conversations with his cousin Wilhelm Gundert, which helped him to finish the second part of
Siddhartha after a longer break.
5Cunningham, Hesse and Japan, 47–52; see also Freedman, Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis, 229–30.Shortly after the beginning of the first chapter (“The Brahmin’s Son”), the narrative distance established by the title, the figurative narrative style and the distanced, heterodiegetic narrative voice becomes significantly smaller. While Hesse maintains his distanced, heterodiegetic narrative voice, his narrative focalization soon “zooms in” on the protagonist. This “zooming in” (i.e., internal focalization) on the protagonist’s perspecitve is carefully arranged: distanced, zero focalization, which seems to provide an overview of the subsequent events, quickly shifts from Siddhartha’s mother, who describes “Siddhartha, the strong, the beautiful son,”
6Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 3. to his friend Govinda, who states “that Siddhartha would become no ordinary Brahmin, no lazy sacrificial offical,”
7Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 4. and just as quickly to Siddhartha’s internal focalization, using longer passages to present his reflections while preserving the distanced, heterodiegetic narrative voice:
Siddhartha had started nursing discontent within himself. He had started feeling that his father’s love, and his mother’s love, and also his friend Govinda’s love would not make hin happy forever and always, not please him, gratify him, satisfy him. … Splendid were the offerings, and the involving of the gods—but was that all there was? Did the offerings bring happiness? And what about the gods? Was it really Prajapati who had created the world? Was it not Atman, he the Only One, the All-One? Were not the gods formations, created like me and you, subject to time, ephemeral? … And where was Atman to be found, where did he dwell, where did his eternal heart beat if not in one’s own self, in the innermost, in the indestructible essence that every person bore within?
8Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 5.This “zooming in” on the protagonist’s perspective using a distanced, heterodiegetic voice sometimes resembles a stream of consciousness. This “flow” of impressions becomes a significant feature of Hesse’s narrative strategy, which he applies mainly to experiences and reflections.
The general “mood” of the narrative is diegetic and distanced: dialogue gives way to narrated events, speech, or thoughts. Maintaining the same heterodiegetic narrative voice, focalization moves back and forth between distanced zero focalization and internal focalization on Siddhartha, thus “zooming in” several times, as in the chapter titled “Among the Samanas”: “He saw dealers dealing, princes hunting, mourners mourning their dead, …—and everything was unworthy of his eyes, everything lied, everything stank …, and everything was unacknowledged decay. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture.”
9Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 13–15.In the fourth chapter, “Awakening,” the “zooming in” effect is intensified: the narrative focalizes internally on the protagonist, whose insights are now presented mimetically, in the first person, as an internal monologue characterized by the least possible narrative distance:
“Oh,” he thought, breathing a deep sigh of relief, “I will no longer let Siddhartha slip away! I will no longer start my thinking and my living with Atman and the suffering of the world. … Yoga-Veda will no longer teach me, nor will Atharva-Veda, nor the ascetics, nor any kind of teaching. I will learn from me, from myself, I will be my own pupil: I will get to know myself, the secret that is Siddhartha.”
10Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 36.Both strategies for reducing narrative distance, that is, zooming in and internal monologue, highlight the key message: “no one is granted deliverance through a teaching”
11Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 32. using “deliverance from suffering”
12Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 32. a common Buddhist transcription of enlightenment. On the one hand, this key message corresponds to Buddhist doctrine, but on the other it emphazises the constructivist concept of the supremacy of experiential learning over theoretical knowledge. Siddhartha describes his learning as a cyclical experiential process and even compares this process to hermeneutics in a self-referential manner, that is, “read[ing] the book of the world and the book of my own being.”
13Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 37.Thus, from the outset, there is a tension between narrative elements that create narrative distance, such as alluding to Buddha’s life story, now long past, and a heterodiegetic and often zero-focalized narrative voice that uses the past tense and exotic words on the one hand, and elements that reduce narrative distance on the other. In this context the repeated “zooming-in effects” on the protagonist serve to describe his constructivist learning experiences in heightened terms by presenting his experiential learning with low narrative distance and thus supporting the reader’s identification with this learning process.
Also Siddhartha’s dialogues, for example with Gautama, the historical Buddha figure, are distance-reducing elements, as they imitate the protagonist’ s intellectual reflections on the Buddha’s teachings.
14Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Neugroschel, 31–33.This varying narrative distance, that is, combining repeated zooming-in with a distanced, heterodiegetic narrative voice, creates what Marcus Hartner calls a “literary evocation of fictional consciousness.”
15Marcus Hartner, “Constructing Literary Character and Perspective: An Approach from Psychology and Blending Theory,” in Blending and the Study of Narrative: Approaches and Applications, ed. Marcus Hartner and Ralf Schneider (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2012), 86. This effect draws readers into the consciousness of a fictional character and encourages them to identify with the protagonist’s perspective, his experiences, and also with his existential questions.