SOURCE: “From Demian to The Glass Bead Game: Themes and Variations,” in The Hero's Quest for the Self: An Archetypal Approach to Hesse's Demian and Other Novels, University Press of America, 1987, pp. 105–11.

In the following excerpt, Richard examines Hesse's idea of unity in Siddhartha, and asserts that it is an intellectual construct not based on personal experience.

In Siddhartha it is the river that serves as a symbol of the pleromatic fullness and synchronistic timelessness of the unconscious. Unlike Klein, who must actually drown himself to be reborn, Siddhartha is saved from drowning by the illumination that comes to him in the sound of the holy syllable “Om.” The “terrible emptiness in his soul” that causes him to contemplate suicide is itself a symbolic death. The sacred symbol reestablishes his contact with “all that he had forgotten, all that was divine” and fills his soul again with the...