In Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of Demian, a few things happen in quick succession. Sinclair begins puberty and completes his confirmation class while Demian gave him a parallel education on critical thinking. He goes to boarding school, drinks too much, and paints a picture of a woman that resembles Max Demian. Then he meets Demian in a bar. Sinclair receives a note he’s sure is from Demian while in one of his classes, and later acquaints himself with Pistorius the organist.
Through these chapters we can follow a few distinct threads. First of all, it is made evident that Sinclair is very fond of Demian, almost romantically so. Most of chapter 3 is spent describing confirmation class and Demian’s revolutionary ideas that keep enrapturing and enlightening Sinclair. In chapter 4, however, Demian is left behind for boarding school. Sinclair, alone and rebellious, takes to dreaming and painting and conjures an image of a woman he feels many things about. He describes it as both masculine and feminine, as Demian, and as himself (66-67). The painting was supposed to be of the girl from the park, the one he named Beatrice, but as it went through several iterations it looked less like her and more like the face that Sinclair kept dreaming about: Demian’s. Sinclair had originally chosen the image of Beatrice to worship because it made him believe he could become a part of the world of light again, since drinking and sinning left him in the dark.
(Bless you, Soft Cell.)
This surprised me, breaking me temporarily out of the mimetic register, interrupting my flow as the addressee. Demian has challenged the world of light not as dishonest but as a world incomplete; he has brought Sinclair into new schools of thought and shown him new lenses through which to view religion, God, life, and people. Sinclair loves him for this, even though a part of him continues to yearn for the illusory completeness of the lost world of light (much like Cypher in The Matrix misses the bliss of unknowing). Though confused and alone in boarding school, Sinclair goes as far as to try to imitate Demian by retelling his version of Cain and Abel to Beck during his first encounter with alcohol (56).
This is when I realized something somewhere in the thematic register: this world of light that Sinclair yearns for, but knows he may never completely belong to again, is his childhood innocence. It was the veil over his eyes that separated his good world from the bad one that he knew only by reputation. Demian, however, moves freely between the good world and the dark one, and teaches Sinclair how to do the same because he sees the same power in his naive friend. Sinclair does have the power to move freely between the two, but is less cognizant of this. He is a rebel in high school, “a notorious, reckless barfly (59).” In the next line on the same page, he spells it out: “Once again I belonged entirely to the dark world – to the devil – and in that world I was considered a splendid fellow.”
“Once again,” he says. He is aware that he is shifting back and forth from light to dark, just not that he can control this. Sinclair is also capable of being fully immersed in whichever world he belongs to at a given time. He is what Gallop would call an ethical reader. He is behaving the way each world needs him to behave to be considered successful in that world, much like a submissive addressee. This lets him see both sides of the value chart as well, so to speak. In the light world, or Controlling Idea: the Purpose is that following the rules of law and church protects you. The Context is that breaking the rules leads to suffering and self-doubt. The Counter Idea (aka dark world), however, the Purpose is that shirking institutional rules and making your own way provides strength of character and spiritual toughness. The Context is that blindly obeying laws signifies weakness and stupidity. In this chart we see that Sinclair has been moving dynamically through the “infinity” loop throughout the story so far.
He was light as a child, dark under Kromer’s thumb, light in confirmation class, dark in boarding school, light when worshipping Beatrice and painting. Like one of McKee’s value graphs, we see the emotional charge of our theme going up and down. Demian is at the heart of Sinclair’s ups and downs, catalysing them all directly or indirectly.
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