The Benomyth

Joseph Campbell’s penultimate step in the monomyth “The Master of Two Worlds” is an admittedly confusing one in the context of Siddhartha. This is owed in no small part to the fact that many of the final steps listed by Joseph Campbell seemingly mold together in Hermann Hesse’s novel. Steps like “The Ultimate Boon,” or “Magical Flight” quickly ease into the next one or gloss over one another entirely. In the context of Siddhartha, I would argue that the Ultimate Boon is the Siddhartha’s realization that he has become the “Master of Two Worlds.” Any further difficulty in applying Campbell’s monomyth to the text hereafter can be derived from the inherent difficulty in pinpointing the chronology of this realization in the text. I, myself, in struggling to select a passage that encapsulated the ideas of the “Master of Two Worlds” (in which the protagonist’s “ ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes,...