Orientalist Representation of the East in Hesse’s The Journey to the East

Abstract

This Research explores the writer Hermann Hesse’s biased discourse of Orientalism while travelling the Eastern places. Hesse’s representation of East as a exotic, full of romance, adventure and mystery. It dwells on the binaries like one and other, civilized and uncivilized, rational and emotional etc, thereby assigning the negative attributes to the ‘Oriental’. The writer Hesse portrays the goal of every character in the novel. They travel to the East with the expectation of romance and adventure. The narrator himself is travelling to the East with the hope of seeing the beautiful princess of Fatima of Arabia. The picture of East that Hesse has presented in The Journey to the East is fictional and imaginative. There is not any authenticity about the image of the East. Hesse sees the East as heroic and magical place. In The Journey to the East, we can see the true nature of the West to the East, a fictitious world created with myths, one finds at West.