What can friendship teach someone? Can a good friendship affect someone’s behaviors and the path they take in life? In Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha, friendships teach Siddhartha the essential elements of life. As he searches for enlightenment, he meets friends along the way that teach him loyalty, love, business, and contentment. Through his writing, Hermann Hesse shows that friendships teach Siddhartha the things he needs to know to reach enlightenment when he learns loyalty through his friendship with Govinda and learns to love through his relationship with Kamala.
In the novel, Siddhartha is taught the qualities of loyalty through his friendship with Govinda. Govinda’s loyalty is proven when Siddhartha says, “You have always been my …show more content…
Kamala became pregnant with Siddhartha’s child the last time they were together: “After a time, she found that she was with child as a result of her last meeting with Siddhartha.” Later on in his life, Siddhartha meets up with Kamala again and meets his son. His son is very disrespectful, but Siddhartha loves him so deeply that it does not matter. In the novel, Siddhartha ponders, “Once, when the boy’s face reminded him of Kamala, Siddhartha suddenly remembered something she had once said to him a long time ago. ‘You cannot love,’ she had said to him and he had agreed with her...But now, since his son was there, he, Siddhartha, had become completely like one of the people through sorrow, through loving. He was madly in love, a fool because of love.” Siddhartha once thought that he was incapable of loving anything, but since he met Kamala and had a son with her, he realized he could in fact love fully and deeply. If Kamala and Siddhartha had never become friends, Siddhartha would have never experienced such a deep love through their child together. Siddhartha is not only taught what love is, but he learns how important it is for everyone’s lives. He says, “it seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world.” Throughout the novel, Siddhartha learns how to love deeply but he also learns how