Firstly, it is useful to examine how Siddhartha speaks. Does his way of speaking change over time, reflecting his growth? In order to do this, I first explored Siddhartha’s most frequently used words (figure 12). This technique is again similar to the ones of Jonathan Culpeper to explore the character development in Romeo and Juliet as well as that of Stephen Ramsay for his research of The Waves, as mentioned in chapter 2. The figure below was created by extracting a document only containing Siddhartha’s spoken words from the novel and removing its stopwords, to prevent the algorithm from mostly finding articles and pronouns. This, because this project focusses mostly on thematic developments and the words that can be connected to the themes as mentioned in earlier sections. The words ‘Govinda’ and ‘Siddhartha’ were manually added to this list.92
92 Stopwords were removed with a code by S. Wagner, ‘Text Mining – Part 2: Making-Of’, INWT Statistics, 5
September 2017 <https://www.inwt-statistics.de/blog-artikel-lesen/text-mining-part-2-making-of.html> (9 May, 2018).
49 Figure 12. Siddhartha's most frequently used words
When looking at the top five of words in the graph, ‘Lehre’ and ‘lernen’ are both words that could be expected to be found at the top of the list, judging from previous most frequent word results as well as the overall importance of the theme Lehre. However, ‘Welt’, ‘Leben’ and ‘weiss’ also appear in the top five in this graph. To investigate just why exactly these words are so well represented in
Siddhartha’s vocabulary, the concordances function in Voyant was used once more. ‘Welt’ and ‘weiss’ do not yield very remarkable results for now, but will be discussed in the next section. The results of ‘Leben’ however call for further investigation.
Looking at the concordance results for ‘Leben’ (Appendix A-2), a few observations with regards to Siddhartha’s developments can be made by applying the same method that was applied in the previous section. As became clear from the previous section, the word ‘mehr’ emphasises
Siddhartha’s focus on becoming something else. The term ‘Leben’, when Siddhartha uses it in his speech, often points in this direction as well, as can be inferred from its concordances.
To summarise, these concordances show Siddhartha speaking of starting a new life (‘Mit Tagesanbruch werde ich das Leben der Samanas beginnen’), life in a cycle (Ob sie gut oder böse, ob das Leben in ihr Leid oder Freude sei, möge dahinggestellt bleiben, es mag vielleicht sein, dass dies nicht wesentlich is - aber die Einheit der Welt, der Zusammenhang alles Geschehens [...] dies leuchtet hell aus deiner erhabenen Lehre.') and changing his way of life (‘Nicht mehr will ich mein Denken und mein Leben beginnen mit Atman und mit dem Leid der Welt.’). Judging from these concordances, Siddhartha clearly regards life not just as a part of a cycle, but also as a path that one chooses for oneself. This mindset is emphasised when he tells ferryman Vasudeva: ‘Ein schönes Leben hast du dir
50 erwählt.’ Consequently, he ends up joining Vasudeva and living life like he does. The combination of computational methods and a goal-oriented close reading, in this instance, illustrates how the use of ‘Leben’ shows that in all of these examples, like with ‘mehr’, Siddhartha is focussed on becoming. This focus was not as clear by far from my close reading as it has become using this particular method.
When following the concordances of ‘Leben’ through time another aspect that stands out about its use is how the word ‘Leben’ ceases to be used entirely after Siddhartha and Vasudeva’s conversation in chapter 9, during which Siddhartha decides to stay with the ferryman. Looking at the list, ‘Leben’ only comes up again in the final chapter, where Siddhartha attempts to preach to Govinda about reaching enlightenment. Starting from the first concordance entry of this final chapter, Siddhartha explains the universe as being complete, with children having an elderly version of themselves in them already, the dying having immortal life in them already. He explains that the lives that were, are and will be are actually one, and in fact, that death is like life, sin like holiness and cleverness like ignorance. Thus, rather than breaking up life into stages like he used to, he now describes ‘Leben’ as being part of a complete oneness, just like he parted with his most used meaning of ‘mehr’ as ‘anymore’ after realising that all is one in chapter 11.
It is of course clear from a close reading of the text that Siddhartha develops and that he learns about the unity with the aid of the river, but to see it reflected so clearly in Siddhartha’s use of the words ‘Leben’ and ‘mehr’ makes it clear that his philosophy has not merely changed; he has actually understood more, like he argues he has. In the end, when he preaches to Govinda, he tells him that it is important to understand, not to know and learn, and that is exactly what his most frequently used words in combination with their concordances have shown: that Siddhartha is now comfortable within his own philosophy and knowledge, rather than knowing of something, i.e. the unending cycle, but not understanding it.
In short, like with ‘mehr’ in the previous section, the list of concordances for ‘Leben’ makes it possible to zoom in on the results acquired by the use of computational methods, and see how Siddhartha’s developments are in fact reflected in his changing vocabulary.