In this excerpt, Ziolkowski explores the epiphanies that Siddhartha experiences.
Siddhartha's smile … is the best example of the new dimension that we find in this novel. Here, in brief, we have the same story that we encountered in Demian: a man's search for himself through the stages of guilt, alienation, despair, to the experience of unity. The new element here is the insistence upon love as the synthesizing agent. Hesse regards this element as "natural growth and development" from his earlier beliefs, and certainly has no reversal or change of opinion. In the essay "My Faith" (1931) he admitted "that my Siddhartha puts not cognition, but love in first place: that it disdains dogma and makes the experience of unity the central point…." Cognition of unity as in Demian is not the ultimate goal, but.....
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