Saturday, April 5, 2008
Siddhartha is rich and admirable. If this is true, why does he feel empty and sick?
Siddhartha had become a different man in his time living in the town. He had become rich, people looked up to him, and he had a house. He had been introduced to the world of business and money. As these changes occured within Siddhartha, he slowly forgot all he had learned from the Samanas. Siddhartha had become an ordinary person. The voice that he had always listened to had faded and no longer spoke in his mind. His "new" life seemed old. "In the same way it lost its color and sheen witht the passing of the years: creases and stains had accumulated, and hidden in the depts, here and there already appearing, waited disillusionment and nausea" (Hesse, 78). Siddhartha was no longer the person he had once been and the idea of what he had become made him sick and hateful. He became evaricious and gambled all the time. He would play dice to hide how he felt and would drink to make the gambling easier. He would win or lose his money and the thought of all this made him sick, so he went back to gamble again. He knew that his life had become circuitous. "...whenever shame and nausea overtook him, he fled to a new game of chance, fled in confusion to passion, to wine, and from there back again to urge for acquiring and hoarding wealth. He wore himself out in this senseless cycle, beame old and sick" (Hesse,80). Siddhartha lost all equanimity and became a person who almost seemed insane. He tried to continue in the life he was leading, but he knew that life was wrong. He felt reproach for the person he had become. He thought this was the life he had wanted, but he realized how wrong he had been.
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3 comments:
The feeling that Siddhartha got from becoming rich was not what he expected. He wanted to become a rich and a wealthy man to proof to Kamala that he could be good enough for her. She gave him the initiative to change from being a Samana and his willpower allowed him to do this. When he got rich, he did bad things though. He began to gamble and became someone he did not want to be. Siddhartha did not like the empty feeling that he would feel at times and would try to cover it up by doing more gambling and drinking. This constant cycle would make him feel sick because he knew that that was not his true self and did not like the way he was living his life.
As Siddhartha is rich and admirable, he also feels a sense of emptiness and sickness. I agree with this post. At first, Siddhartha has a feeling of superiority. As the novel progresses, Siddhartha has a circuitous course of events. He also has ostracized himself from the rest of humanity. Siddhartha has a feeling of emptiness and sickness becuase his mind is full of the many paths to enlightenment. Siddhartha is very confused about what path to take.
When Siddhartha went to live with the Samanas, he abandoned everything he had while living with his father. He had everything a man could want, good clothes, respect, admiration, money, and food. However, once he fled to the forest, he lost all of those and was forced to live with none of those things. He decided to leave the Samanas, in his reproach for their teachings and believed that they would not work, to hear Buddha, and ended up living in a village, just like the one he left. He met Kamala, and wanted her to teach him, and when she did, he became just like he had been before, rich and admirable and satiated the beliefs of the Samanas, and their lifestyle. This is the reason he feels so empty. He became a man, who didn’t care about the people, but about how much money he could make, and how fast he could lose and win it back. He didn’t care about the people who he was trying to help when he left the town and after seeing this, he realized that his life wasn’t worth anything living in the town, and therefore he felt worthless, and sick with himself.
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