Defining the Themes

To be able to follow the themes of Lehre, searching, time and love across the story, it is useful to first define said themes and identify which words to associate with each theme (apart from the obvious words ‘Lehre’, ‘Suche’, ‘Zeit’ and ‘Liebe’). This is because later in this chapter, when I will look at how the themes are dispersed across the novel, I aim to incorporate a large number of words associated with each theme in each dispersion plot, as doing so will yield results that are more representative of each theme than by simply using the words ‘Lehre’, ‘Suche’, ‘Zeit’ and ‘Liebe’.

In order to find the words that can be considered to be a part of each theme, it is useful to first create a topic model of the novel, using a version of the original text file without stopwords.80

Topic modelling, as became clear in chapter 2, is a technique that groups words that can frequently occur together. The resulting word clusters may or may not form identifiable topics (or themes), but they do give us an idea of what words occur in a similar context no matter how identifiable the outcome is. Topic modelling is thus ideal to find words that are associated with each other throughout the text.81 _{As was also mentioned in chapter 2, topic modelling is often used on larger}

corpora, rather than on a single text. Adding to that, if only a small number of tokens go into a topic model, the quality of the topics will be lower. Therefore, it is worth noting that, to come to a usable result, it was needed in this case to experiment with the number of ‘topics’ that the code that was used searches for. When aiming for five or seven topics, for example, the algorithm simply combines words per chapter. Setting the number of topics to ten however, resulted in the model in figure 7. This model, too of course, simply groups words together that appear in the same chapter, but it also yields more successful results, as it actually groups words that can be interpreted as forming topics

80 _{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).

81 _{A topic model was created with a code by Book and Byte, ‘File Repository’}

36 together. As the programme does not label the lists itself, these can be interpreted with the help of prior knowledge of the novel and its themes. Not all topics are very interpretable or coherent, such as topic 4 and 5, which mostly remind of particular chapters of the novel. However, topic 1 may be argued to be about time, 2 appears to thematise love and 3 may be argued to be about Lehre. Topic 6 appears to consist of words related to love and wisdom. What is more, topic 7 thematises

Siddhartha’s life as a Brahman and Samana and thus also focusses on Lehre, and topics 9 and 10 both clearly focus on Sansara, time and the ongoing cycle. No other themes come to light using this technique.

37 The next step is to manually sort and pick the relevant words for each topic, to be able to compile a list that is representative of each topic. Firstly, upon closer inspection, the following words can be identified as being a part of the theme Lehre: ‘Buddha’, ‘Samanas’, ‘Gotama’, ‘Erhabenen’ (which is how Buddha is referred to), ‘Gotamas’, ‘Zuflucht’ (in the sense of seeking refuge in a Lehre) and ‘Mönche’.

Secondly, in the case of ‘Zeit’, the list of words that can be compiled with the help of topic 9 and 10 is especially helpful. Firstly, ‘Tod’, ‘Abschied’, ‘letzten’, ‘vergänglich’, ‘Sansara’ and ‘gestorben’ all symbolise life being transient, stressing that things come to an end. ‘Tag’, ‘immer’ and ‘geworden’ stress the fact that the characters divide their lives and developments by a kind of temporal thinking. However, ‘Fluss’ and ‘Flusse’, as the river stands for the ongoing cycle, defy time and are thus a very vital part of the theme also. They shed light on the theme from the point of view of Siddhartha’s final attitude towards time: it does not exist. Everything is one.

Thirdly, in the case of the theme ‘love’, Siddhartha learns to love unconditionally during his time by the water, as was discussed in chapter 3. The cause for this, amongst other things, is his experience with gaining and losing a son. Words associated with this as can be found in topic 1 of the topic model are ‘Sohn’, ‘Knabe’, ‘Knaben’, ‘Vater’ and of course Siddhartha’s ‘Leiden’: his suffering as a result of his love. ‘Kamala’ was left out of this list on purpose, as it is stressed in the novel that Siddhartha never truly loved her:

»Gut hast du meine Kunst gelernt, Siddhartha. Einst, wenn ich älter bin, will ich von dir ein Kind haben. Und dennoch, Lieber, bist du ein Samana geblieben, dennoch liebst du mich nicht, du liebst keinen Menschen. Ist es nicht so? «

»Es mag wohl so sein", sagte Siddhartha müde. "Ich bin wie du. Auch du liebst nicht—wie könntest du sonst die Liebe als eine Kunst betreiben? Die Menschen von unserer Art können vielleicht nicht lieben. Die Kindermenschen können es; das ist ihr Geheimnis.«82

Lastly, when it comes to the theme of ‘searching’, the topic model sadly does not yield very coherent results. However, this could be expected, as Siddhartha’s search is a more implicit theme that is relevant across the entire story.

Now that they have been associated with the various themes of Siddhartha, the words that were found with the help of topic modelling can be included when analysing the dispersion of the

38 themes in the next section. However, these words are not the only words that should be added to the list of words associated with each theme. Indeed, it is also important to add all variations of the words ‘Lehre’, ‘Liebe’, ‘Zeit’ an ‘Suche’ to the list.83 _{The table below, as a result, shows the variations}

of ‘Lehre’, ‘Liebe’, ‘Zeit’ and ‘Suche’ that are used in Siddhartha, as well as the words that could be ascribed to a theme using topic modelling.

Theme Words Associated

Searching Suche, suchen, suchend, Suchenden, Suchender, Suchens, Sucher, suchst, sucht, suchte

Lehre Lehrbare, Lehrbücher, Lehre, lehren, lehrend, Lehrer, Lehrerin, Lehrern, Lehrers, Lehrling, lehrreiche, lehrt, lehrte, lehrten, Buddha, Samanas, Gotama, Erhabenen, Gotamas, Zuflucht, Mönche

Love Liebe, liebend, liebende, liebenden, liebenswert, Lieber, Liebesfeier, Liebesgenusses, Liebeskunst, Liebeslust, Liebesspiel, Liebhaber, lieblich, lieblichen, lieblicher,

lieblosigkeit, liebst, Liebsten, Liebster, liebt, liebte, liebten, Sohn, Knabe, Knaben, Vater, leiden

Time Zeit, Zeiten, Fluss, Tod, gestorben, Flusse, vergänglich, immer, langsam, Abschied, Sansara, Tag, letzten, geworden