Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and Hermann Hesse's Question About Identity
Hermann Hesse ran away from his seminary at fourteen. Years later he walked away from his German citizenship too. Twice he left an identity that others insisted was his. His novels keep returning to that struggle. Siddhartha lives fully as a rich merchant before he knows that life was never his. Harry Haller in Steppenwolf believes he is split between a respectable man and a wolf, until he learns there are hundreds of selves inside him, not two. I have been reading about identity for my research, and I keep coming back to Hesse. Psychologists like Dan McAdams and Herminia Ibarra describe identity as a story we keep revising and a set of selves we try on. Yet at work we are rewarded for holding on to the one version that once made us successful. So when someone says "be true to yourself", I want to ask which self they mean. I have written about this in my new article. I would love to hear what you had to let go of before the next version of you could show up.
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