In Summary, You Can't Spell "Abraxas" Without "Bra"

I actually kind of love the word "Bildungsroman," though I don't understand why it's capitalized. It just sounds pretentious as fuck but you know it just doesn't give a fuck. Plus, it's basically anchored with the word "dung," or at least I like to think so.

All of which is to say, Hermann Hesse's Demian is a Bildungsroman.

I hadn't read Demian since at some point in high school, and definitely didn't remember much about it. Then I started reading it and vague memories started flooding back: weird MILF-y characters (the concept of the "MILF" not being something we knew about back then [googling: yup, seems more recent]), Sprockets-like affectations, and then ultimately this superweird repressed undercurrent a little later on (in fact, this brought up some adolescent PTSD — I remembered lines like "You practice continence, too, don't you?" and was transported: what in the fuck were these people thinking?).

Suffice it to say, then, as now, I don't think I "got" that Demian was — duh! — Sinclair's older, wiser self. I think I was too busy perseverating on the character of "Pistorius" and thinking "Oscar" . . .