Siddhartha Final Quiz
Siddhartha Final Quiz Name: Mystery Date: 10-15-12 In Siddhartha the relationships between father and son are very dysfunctional. Siddhartha leaves his father when he was very young to seek something besides the Brahmans lifestyle He felt like he had learned all he could from the people of his childhood. He journeyed far and wide to seek out the proper teachings but never remembered to see his father or even send word to him of how he was doing. We don’t know how his father dealt with that, because the father didn’t know if he was dead or living and never saw his son after the day he left.
He never got to say goodbye when he died. Siddhartha later in life, while living on the ferry as the ferryman’s assistant, learned that he himself had a son. Siddhartha learned that the mother of his son was dying from a snake bite, and he must take care of the child. The child was very young and had been raised in a rich and lavish lifestyle. To go from that to dirt poor poverty living on a ferry taking people across the river is very hard to do for a child. The son sees it as the ultimate insult.
No matter what the son does he cannot seem to get his father’s attention. He tries to get Siddhartha to strike him or yell at him anything except him sitting there listening never speaking. The boy eventually gets to the point at which he steals the two older men’s money and flees the river trying to get back to the town where he has a rich boy life waiting for him. Siddhartha chases after him but ends up meditating for hours on end in front of kamala’s old home which is now a Buddha monk home.
He awakens and finds that he has lost his son like his father lost his so many years ago. He goes back to the barge and the river is said to silently mock him and laugh at him, because he has done this to his dad and now it has been done to him. He realizes that life is forever repeating but with different faces and a different person, but it is all the same all at once. Siddhartha tells this to his dear friend Govinda, and he enlightened govinda so that he knelt down in front of Siddhartha and wept with the great love and knowledge he now possessed.
