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 which his original innocence develops into the wiles of a ladies' man, although he retains his essential kindness. He learns to draw and sculpt, and often regards his own life through the lens of art. His absent mother, a beautiful and wild noblewoman, becomes his muse. Goldmund's life of wandering puts him into dangerous situations, and he kills two men, the first one in self-defense and the second to protect a woman. He later is imprisoned and almost executed, but is saved at the last moment by Narcissus. On two occasions, once at the house of a master artist, and later when he returns to the cloister, Goldmund stops wandering long enough to create beautiful religious art. This helps him to reassess his life, which he often had considered to be sinful and worthless. Near death, he accepts that despite the mistakes he made and the wrongs he committed, his art shows that the goodness in him remained alive.
