Siddhartha (3-25)

If it helps, you might want to label the parts of your blog posts. Each post needs:

• Context: A little summary of what's happening, so we can understand the quotation
• A quotation: Anywhere from a few lines to a paragraph from your book.
• Questions: You need to respond to your quotation in some way. The easiest way to do this is to ask a few questions about it and then answer the questions. You may ask literal, interpretive, or thematic questions (you don't need one of each). More advanced posts might not actually have the questions written out, but the topic sentence of each paragraph is still asking a question implicitly.

CONTEXT:

This is from the very beginning of the book. I don't know much about what is going on except that Siddhartha is a boy who seems to have a pretty happy life. His parents love him, he has a close friend, and he is good at his schoolwork. This is the first time that it seems like he might not be completely happy with his life.

QUOTATION:

Siddhartha had begun to feel the seeds of discontent within him. He had begun to feel that the love of his father and mother, and also the love of his friend Govinda, would not always make him happy, give him peace, satisfy and suffice him. He had begun to suspect that his worthy father and his other teachers, the wise Brahmins, had already passed on to him the bulk and bets of their wisdom, that they had already poured the sum total of their knowledge into his waiting vessel; that the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still. (5)

QUESTIONS:

Literal: What parts of himself did Siddhartha think might not be fully satisfied?

Siddhartha thinks his intellect, his soul, and his heart are not what they could be.

Interpretive: How might Siddhartha feel about this lack of fullness?

I imagine that he might feel a bit of resentment, because he expects the adults in his life to provide him everything he needs, and he's starting to realize that they are not going to provide that to him. It's possible Siddhartha also feels guilt. Since he knows that his family is doing their best for him, and that he's lucky to have so much love, he might feel guilty that he doesn't feel satisfied. Or maybe he just feels a little bit of teenage restlessness, a need to get away from the predictable life that has been prepared for him and discover life on his own terms.

Thematic: Does everybody feel, at some point, like there must be something more to life?

I'm really not sure. I know that I have definitely felt this way at times, particularly when I have felt like my life is too routine, like I'm missing out on a lot of fun by being too responsible. Strangely, though, I have also felt like there must be something more at times when life is so great that there's nothing left to wish for. Maybe people need to always want something more, and when they are allowed to have anything they want, they get freaked out because they still don't feel satisfied.

Hesse, Hermann. Siddhartha. New York: Bantam, 1951.