Theme Of Enlightenment In Siddhartha

Life is a journey of failures that urges people to strive and try again to succeed. This idea is depicted through Siddhartha’s journey throughout the novel where he is met with continuous failures. It is through these failures in life and all his experiences that he is able to learn and be pushed toward the path of Enlightenment.
Siddhartha’s past experiences are essential for him to reach Enlightenment. By going through these struggles and different paths of life, he gained different outlooks on life and connected them to reveal how everything flows together. “And all of it together, all voices, all goals, all yearnings, all sufferings, all pleasures, all good and evil – the world was everything together” (Hesse 119). From an isolated life with the Samanas to a life full of greed and sin in civilization, these extremes were necessary to give him insight into how these societies
interacted and functioned.
It is through these experiences that at the end of the novel give him the final insight that all these societies, despite their differences, are all similar and one. They all strive for a goal and suffer to get them. With the Samanas, he suffered through isolation, hunger and impatience to achieve Enlightenment. In civilization, he suffered through the feeling of unfulfillment, greed, and pleasure to achieve Enlightenment. In both cases he lost himself, which forced him to find himself. In doing so, he left both situations and was reawaken and led down a new path that would eventually lead him to Enlightenment. Without undergoing these failed paths, he would have never felt the need to continue searching for Nirvana and approaching it. From each path he learned something new that was essential to reaching Nirvana. He learned how to experience emotions and pleasures of life and how to think and meditate in order to
appreciate what is truly valuable. He learned how to understand others from all walks of life because he walked in those paths himself. These abilities and experiences were essential for him to attain his goal and to finally understand that everything is connected and the same, despite how different they may appear from the surface. Siddhartha’s journey to achieve his goal is similar to the journey people go through in life. In life, people need to fail in order to learn from their mistakes and be pushed to go further. Failures in life make people want to figure out where it all went wrong and strive to make it better. This drive to attain a goal is only reinforced after a failure. A failure makes someone realize how badly a goal means to them and makes them want to continue going for it until the efforts are successful. Similarly, Siddhartha continuous failures cause him to continue to strive for his goal because he realizes how badly he wants to attain this inner peace. This drive in him pushes him past his failures and allows him to learn from his mistakes. At the end, he is able to bring together everything he has learned throughout his journey and utilize it to finally reach his goal. In life, failure is the only way to learn, push, achieve, and appreciate the success attained from reaching a goal.