Narziss und Goldmund

Narcissus and Goldmund grow up together at the fictional cloister school of Mariabronn, but their natures diverge sharply. Narcissus is analytical and devoted to a monastic, intellectual life; Goldmund is sensual and restless.

After an encounter that awakens his desire for experience over doctrine, Goldmund leaves the monastery to wander medieval Germany, taking numerous lovers and eventually apprenticing himself to a master woodcarver after being moved by a carved Madonna. His travels through plague, violence, and imprisonment shape him into an artist, while Narcissus rises within the church as an abbot.

The two are reunited later in life, each having lived out one half of a divide between reason and instinct that neither can fully resolve alone. First published in German as Narziss und Goldmund in 1930, the novel is one of Hermann Hesse's best-known explorations of the tension between the intellectual and the artistic temperament.