Cara’s Reviews > Demian > Status Update

“I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise” (pg. 65). Poor Sinclair is drowning, his only refuge is the bottle and it’s destroying his mental health. This is what happens when you send an extremely depressed young man with severe identity issues away to boarding school as a hope that it will “fix” him. I expect nothing less from pre-war Germany.

“…Beck very much wanted me to confess to having slept with girls. This was out of my league. I hadn’t experienced anything, certainly nothing worth telling. And what I had felt, what I had constructed in imagination, ached within me but had not been loosened or made communicable by the wine.” Okay dawg we know what you are😭😭

Page 41: “Many people experience the dying and rebirth-which is our fate-only this once during their entire life. Their childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe…and for the rest of their lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the lost paradise…”

Sinclair sounds like the type of kid who I would have told stories about to my parents around the dinner table after school, and they would warn me there was something wrong with him. He does not think like a 10-year-old boy, and I don't know whether that is intentional or he's just mentally on a different level than the rest of his peers. He's like a sad neurotic young Sheldon Cooper.