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Jul. 6th, 2005
As some of you know, the theme of my thesis is the split personality as portrayed in the books of Hermann Hesse. For that I need to read three books: Unterm Rad, Demian and Narziss und Goldmund. Right now, I'm reading Unterm Rad (Under the Wheel). It's about an intelligent boy from whom everybody - his teachers, his father, the whole town - demands too much. They want him to go to a sorta boarding school, to be the best, to study during holidays and long into the night with no regards to his desires or health. In the end he snaps under the pressure and has a nervous breakdown that leads to him being thrown out of the school. And when he returns home he realizes that he has no friends, that people mock him for his failure, that his father hates him for his sickness. He starts to work here and there but he never quite fits in anywhere. And in the end he dies. We never learn if it was a suicide or an accident. It's a really sad story.
But the most horrifying thing is that I can see myself in this boy. Always doing my best, even the impossible to meet the demands of others. And "this is not good enough" and "that is not good enough" and "nonsense, of course you can do it" and "what? you failed? are you serious?" and "you should go there and do that and it's easy for you". And me studying for hours and hours until my head ached like crazy and my eyes burned and I was on the verge of despair because after hours and hours I found out that I couldn't remember a thing. In the last 7 years I had only one B, every other exam I aced. Six exams per semester, do your math. Sometimes it's a real burden to be smart and intelligent...
Back to the book Unterm Rad though. Hesse's books are full of homosexual tendencies, that's why I chose him for my thesis. Even in Unterm Rad there is a kiss between the boys Hans and Hermann and the author admits that they share the first love together... That would be so incredibly cute if you didn't know how the story ends.
But reading this book gave me a plot bunny for a 13+5 story.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
michalyn, where are you? I need to bounce ideas! *pouts*
But I finally started to work on the HaruToki story for the "our distance and that person" challenge. I wanted the fic to have 2500 words but just the first scene has almost 1000 words >.< So...
But the most horrifying thing is that I can see myself in this boy. Always doing my best, even the impossible to meet the demands of others. And "this is not good enough" and "that is not good enough" and "nonsense, of course you can do it" and "what? you failed? are you serious?" and "you should go there and do that and it's easy for you". And me studying for hours and hours until my head ached like crazy and my eyes burned and I was on the verge of despair because after hours and hours I found out that I couldn't remember a thing. In the last 7 years I had only one B, every other exam I aced. Six exams per semester, do your math. Sometimes it's a real burden to be smart and intelligent...
Back to the book Unterm Rad though. Hesse's books are full of homosexual tendencies, that's why I chose him for my thesis. Even in Unterm Rad there is a kiss between the boys Hans and Hermann and the author admits that they share the first love together... That would be so incredibly cute if you didn't know how the story ends.
But reading this book gave me a plot bunny for a 13+5 story.
michalyn, where are you? I need to bounce ideas! *pouts*But I finally started to work on the HaruToki story for the "our distance and that person" challenge. I wanted the fic to have 2500 words but just the first scene has almost 1000 words >.< So...
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