How Did Siddhartha's Search For Enlightenment

At its core, Siddhartha is a novel examining a young boy’s search for eternal truths, spiritual enlightenment, and a sense of purpose. He attempts to live entirely devoid of self-pleasure, encounters temptations, then tries a life filled with indulgence. He grapples with the highs and lows of friendship, doubt, anxiety, contemplates suicide, the acquisition and subsequent loss of a family before finally finding a way to achieve his own form of enlightenment. While the novel is riddled with themes and motifs about what it takes to achieve forms of content within oneself, as well as historical parallels using the life of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, I argue that Siddhartha is overwhelmingly an outlet that Nobel Prize-winning author Hermann Hesse used to reflect on the early days of his life and his own search for enlightenment.

And while he liked it at first, it would later be revealed that he faced serious personal crises and began searching for self-discovery nearly a year into the program. Namely, he ran away from the seminary one day to be found in a nearby field a day later (Nobel 3). Not unlike Siddhartha, Hesse seemed to operate the formative younger years of his life as far away from a patient approach as he could. If something did not satisfy his need and longing to find satisfaction and a sense of greater purpose, he moved on to the next option. The character Siddhartha functions largely in the same way, as evident by the time he spent searching for enlightenment with the Samanas, a sort of cult-like group that prided itself on not indulging on material things or a sense of self as a method of achieving spiritual