The Incomprehensible Sadness & Beauty in Knowing Nothing: a Review of Narcissus & Goldmund by Hermann Hesse – Brooke N. Plummer
December 13, 2025
I hadn’t read Hermann Hesse’s work since high school (Siddhartha being the only text I can recall). I had a conversation with our museum director who also said they recently returned to Hesse’s work from many years ago – and in mutual respects, we agreed that his style was refreshing to return to. My own empirical evolution is the relationship between Narcissus and Goldmund. Between bullshitting my way through life and meeting the more reformed version of myself that has a mentoring companionship with the ales of my youth.
There is a unified force that draws time together and transcends our own understanding of its demands. Growth is mandatory. Piquing and tapping out from our potential is an insult to our existence. When Goldmund falls ill, he eventually arrives at the realization that the lost memory of his mother is what caused his fainting. There is an eerie familiarity in Goldmund’s dream sequences, reminiscent of David Chase’s trippy scenes in The Sopranos, in which he recognizes his mother after her chaotic abandonment. I believe this also contributes to his “avoidant attachment” tendencies, drilling an all-or-nothing and what I say goes mentality into his development. This is in opposition to Goldmund’s father who wanted him to suffer the same confinement as his mother, who was pinned down and depleted of her own identity-seeking in their marriage.
Goldmund comes to head with Narcissus on matters of being and purpose. He struggles with free will and the commitment to deterministic obligation. Narcissus, his teacher, had separated himself from closer relations with Goldmund, but also wishes for the practice of discipline to be taken under his wing.
This is a story of psychosocial interplay. A breaking and bending entourage of souls in seeking their match and their maker. A masterful assembly of contradictions in positive light and negative space. Hesse reminds us that “only the life within [us] was real, the anguished beating of [our] hearts, the nostalgic sting of longing, the joys and fears of [our] dreams. To them [we] belonged; to them [we] abandoned ourselves.”