SOURCE: “Time and the Structure of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha,” in Symposium, Vol. 11, No. 1, Fall, 1957, pp. 204–24.

In the following essay, Shaw assesses Hesse's attempt in Siddhartha to transcend the limitations of time and to experience temporal unity.

In 1911 Hermann Hesse set out upon a voyage to India, “to see,” he tells us, “the sacred tree and snake [of Buddha] and to go back into that source of life where everything had begun and which signifies the Oneness [Einheit] of all phenomena.”¹ The vagueness of these words, written some ten years after his return to Europe, testifies to Hesse's uncertainty concerning the exact nature of his quest. The unity or oneness he sought may have been nothing more than a resolution of the conflicts developing within his own personality; it may refer to a cultural and political harmony he had not been able to find in Europe during the years...