Wander In Bildungsroman

Hermann Hesse, with his deep thoughts and cultivation of literature, is known as the Last Knight of German Romanticism. Die Morgenlandfahrt, as Hesse’s later work, is following the basic line of the classical Bildungsroman-the hero, during his wandering, constantly found his self-identity, reconstructed his self-cognition in dark moments and finished his self-shaping through his contacts with the outside world.By the narrator H.H.’s memory and the narration of his journey to the East and his experience of wandering in the cities, this thesis shows us Hesse’s self-exploration process and the his thinking about the relationship between the individual and the whole, which includes how an individual develops himself, expanding himself from private zone to public room and how the hero, integrating his limited personal life into the eternality of human lives and at last realizes a harmonious co-existence between the individual and the environment.At the very beginning, the thesis briefly explains the relationship between the novel Die Morgenlandfahrt and classical bildungsroman for a better understanding of the relationship between the wandering and the bildungsroman. What those bildungsroman try to explore is how humans regulate themselves in their contacts with the outside world and then reach the unity of the inner world and outside world as well as the perception of personalities. Wandering has significant influence on individual self-shaping, self-cultivating and self-development.The wanderings always make the East as their destination. So the thesis then analyses the special role the East played in the hero’s self-shaping process. The East in the wandering, instead of the geographically real East, refers to an idealized embodiment of a spiritual homeland, which could inspire people to step on a new journey, running away from the un-poetically stable and reasonable world, for a poetic place. The East is the home of souls. Journey to the East is a necessary process in the building of the hero’s personalities. The external influence acts on the hero’s inner world, making him constantly think and rethink so he could have a better understanding of both himself and the world and realize the possibility of his self-recognition, returning to a pure spiritual homeland of subject consciousness. Wandering becomes a way to human’s self-fulfillment.In the next part, the thesis explores the role the time and space played in the hero’s construction of subject cognition, especially when the hero left the committee and came back to the city and then found the meaning of his life in his wandering in the city. At that time, all the casualty and linear chronological narration lose their effectiveness. The growth is fragile, accidental and unordered, laced with the past memory. The good memory of old days highlighted the spiritual barrenness of the hero’s life and the effort to tracking those good old days made his life less boring,and showed the possibility of stepping into the future. Wandering in the city helped the hero construct his self-consciousness and self-recognition in his contacts with the culture and history of the outside world. To some extent, it could be called Die Morgenlandfahrt on the city level-the hero H.H. continued his journey to the East in the urban space, which means looking for his spiritual home and the source of life. In his interaction with the outside world, the hero found a chance to realize a new self-cognition and existence and finally resolved the crisis, rejoined the committee and began a new life filled with new possibilities.In the last part, the thesis focused on the narrative significance of the hero H.H. and Hesse’s writing significance of the novel Die Morgenlandfahrt. To some extent both of them refers to one thing, because Hesse is exactly the hero H.H, which is short for Hermann Hesse. H.H, by recording his journey to the East, tried to trace and reserve his experience instead of letting them disappear as time went by. H.H could only prove his existence by his narration of the journey. His narration of his wandering actually has become a special lifestyle. What H.H really explored is a way of expressing in current days, which is full of fragmented languages.Hermann Hesse hoped to use his writings to fight against the time and the current tedious life. And in his fighting with the world, he also tried to find a possibility to integrate the new-self into the outside world by re-constructing the language and the narrative significance. Beyond our fragile daily life, he gave us a new space for our dream and ideal and expressed his expectation of a new possibility in the future and brought spiritual comfort to human beings.