Goldmund

Goldmund is the principal protagonist in this novel. He appears early in the story as a youth who is brought by his father to the Mariabronn cloister to study, with the aim of becoming a monk, but Goldmund does not yet understand his own personality or needs. He thinks that he wants to be a monk, and he is impressed by saintliness of the abbot, but he also is enthralled by the scholarship of the novice, Narcissus. Torn between these two ideals of piousness and intelligence, he does not realize that his own path will be a third way. Only at age 18, when he seduced by a young woman during an afternoon outside the cloister, does Goldmund finally recognize that his fate is to live in the wider world. A beautiful youth, he attracts women easily, and he engages in many amorous encounters over years of wandering, during...