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Siddhartha Appearance Motif

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Submitted By jiwang4
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The Unity of Appearance The novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse exemplifies the idea behind appearance. The novel is able – through dialogue, events, and descriptions – to show how appearance does not exemplify the world as a whole, yet how appearance does not symbolize nothing, but instead how appearance matters in the sense that it changes and tells a story. Appearance matters in a way that all objects of the world portray their story through their appearance. Appearance allows someone or something to see nooks and crannies within objects in order to see that objects past, present and future. For example how the scratches on rocks show weathering while wrinkles on a human show stress. Take that even further and see how deep those scratches are or wrinkles are, what other features can you see, and a story begins to build right in front of you just from appearance. Within the novel we can see this idea of appearance through Siddhartha’s journey to become enlightened. His own appearance changes as he transitions from studious, to gluttonous and to enlightened. With the passage of time appearance evolves and fits the character of the thing it inhabits. Around Siddhartha others also are under the influence of the ideas surrounding appearance. Appearance though different between objects we call the same, as no two rocks are identical, they continue to portray the same image. Parallel to the idea of enlightenment there are multiple paths to the end journey. Appearance allows for these differences in a rock no matter how it looks whether red or blue, big or small, round or square it still shows its sturdy nature. The idea of appearance has been debated to be worth both everything and nothing, yet this is not the case people just haven’t truly looked at what appearance actually is. The overall idea of appearance is that it can convey the story of the object without a word

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