As those familiar with my interpretation know, Siegfried lacks self-conscious awareness, doesn’t know who he is, because Siegfried is, in Wagner’s allegory, the reincarnation of Wotan, as Wagner himself suggested, minus conscious knowledge of who he is:
"... [Wotan] calls out to the earth's primeval wisdom, to Erda, the mother of nature, who had once taught him to fear for his end, telling her that dismay can no longer hold him in thrall since he now wills his own end ... . His end? He knows what Erda's primeval wisdom does not know: that he lives on in Siegfried. Wotan lives on in Siegfried as the artist lives on in his work of art: the freer and the more autonomous the latter's spontaneous existence and the less trace it bears of the creative artist - so that through it (the work of art), the artist himself is forgotten, - the more perfectly satisfied does the artist himself feel: and so, in a certain higher sense, his being forgotten, his disappearance, his death is - the life of the work of art." [693W - {11/6/64} Letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, SLRW, p. 626-627].
Siegfried is Wotan reborn minus conscious knowledge of who he is and his own prehistory, which Brünnhilde, having heard Wotan’s confession of his hoard of forbidden self-knowledge in The Valkyrie Act Two Scene Two, knows for Siegfried. Siegfried the secular artist-hero is the reincarnation of Wotan because, in Wagner’s allegorical scheme, inspired secular art (particularly Wagner’s art of the future, the revolutionary music-drama) falls heir to religious man’s longing for transcendent value when religion as a belief in gods (Wotan and the other gods of Valhalla), or in the one God of monotheists, can no longer be sustained in the face of increasing scientific knowledge. In other words, thanks to Brünnhilde, Siegfried is conscious of Wotan’s confession, which Brünnhilde knows for him as repressed thought, only as sublimated feeling, rather than conscious thought. Since, in this allegory, Brünnhilde knows for Siegfried what Wotan knew, and is in fact the other half of Siegfried, his unconscious mind and artistic muse, it’s not “… a strain to analyze him psychologically, or even semiotically, at anything like the same level as Wotan or Brünnhilde … .” Siegfried’s unconsciousness of who he is, in my interpretation, is the gift offered him by his unconscious mind Brünnhilde, the source of his fearlessness and thus of his heroic stature and of Wotan’s hope for redemption through him, since Brünnhilde’s magic or “Wonder” protects Siegfried from suffering Wotan’s fearful foresight of his tragic fate, the twilight of the gods, that Brünnhilde’s mother Erda told Wotan was predestined by Alberich’s Ring Curse. Kitcher and Schacht have little to say in their book about Alberich’s Ring Curse, being so single-minded in their quest to pursue a few questions at the expense of others which would have granted them a fuller picture of the whole.
Because Kitcher and Schacht are oblivious to the allegorically enhanced mythology Wagner has created in his Ring, their naïve, clumsy efforts to interpret Siegfried’s character, words and actions as if he’s a realistically conceived protagonist in a play instead of a mythic, allegorical being, sometimes reaches ludicrous proportions, as in the following:
“… it is hard to conceive of a youth more ridiculously obtuse than the one who goes charging off on a quest for a beautiful woman - at the merest suggestion by a Woodbird, seconded by a Wanderer who is a complete stranger to him - and who then reacts with such laughably silly surprise when he cuts away the armor of the slumbering figure [Brünnhilde] he discovers on the mountaintop.” [P. 187]
