Shedding the Skin
Siddhartha self-acknowledges crossing the threshold by defining the boundaries that he once declared upon himself, and further realizing that he no longer needs to be restricted by his self understanding. Hesse’s Siddhartha chapter titled “Awakening” displays Siddhartha reflecting on his past set beliefs. At one point Siddhartha “realized that one thing had left him, as a snake is left by its old skin, that one thing no longer existed in him, which had accompanied him throughout his youth and existed in him: the wish to have teachers and to listen to teachings,” (Hesse 37-38). The fitting imagery of a snake shedding its skin and slithering out into the world with a fresh bodily lining perfectly encapsulates stepping, or more slithering, into a new realm. I consider this point in the book, in which Siddhartha concedes to a new era of himself, the specific ‘Crossing the Threshold’ piece of Campbell’s monomyth. One of Siddhartha’s strongest suits as a...