Joseph Knecht

Joseph Knecht, Ludi Magister Josephus III, an elite student of Castalia who is, at the age of forty, appointed Master of the Game, an instrument of transformation and perfection. The novel’s narrator recounts Knecht’s story as a legend rather than as strict biography and traces Knecht’s development from his teenage years at the schools Eschholz and Waldzell, to his years as Master of the Game, and, lastly, to his brief entry into the vita activa before his death. The existential experiences of his life gradually bring him closer to full self-realization (“awakening”). A compassionate individual and open-minded thinker, the protagonist becomes the leader and prototype of all who cultivate the realm of the mind. He displays the most positive of virtues and qualities, and after much study and learning he eventually is able to integrate the ideals of Castalia (mind and contemplation) with those of the temporal world beyond (nature and life). Focused and goal-directed, the self-reliant Knecht exhibits freedom from personal ambition and yet an intense desire for success as he proceeds down the path of self-analysis and ultimate fulfillment. Knecht’s tranquil, cheerful, and radiant manner is free of somberness and fanaticism. His adherence to the ideals of Castalia is superseded by his altruism and preeminent quest for the truth achieved through genuine self-realization. As the meaning of his name in German signifies, Knecht is a servant. He ultimately stands in service to humanity, which is symbolized through his self-sacrifice in ensuring young Tito’s safe emergence from the water as he himself dies.

The Music Master

The Music Master, one of the twelve demigods of the Board of Educators for Castalia. He exercises supreme authority in musical matters. Old and kindly, he functions as Knecht’s lifelong friend and wise mentor. He imparts to Knecht an appreciation of the importance of meditation and of finding truth within oneself. A saintly figure, the Music Master embodies serene cheerfulness and dignity and, in contrast to the other characters with the exception of Knecht, achieves harmony within the world. Through him, Knecht learns that the only path to truth and fulfillment is through oneself.

Plinio Designori

Plinio Designori (PLEE-nee-oh deh-zeen-NYOH-ree), a hospitant at Waldzell, combative friend of Knecht, and future man of the world as politician and government official. Older than Knecht, the handsome, fiery, and well-spoken Designori is a non-Castalian from the outside world who embraces anticlerical views. His dedication to the temporal world (nature) is, however, one-sided, as is revealed when his self-confidence is threatened by the difficulties that he encounters in rearing and relating to his son Tito. Designori thus represents a viewpoint equally as limited as those of the players of the Game, who pursue life abstractly and make no attempt to integrate the complementary poles of mind and nature.

Fritz Tegularius

Fritz Tegularius (teh-gew-LAH-ree-ews), a friend of and later assistant to Knecht. He is one of the most gifted and brilliant of the players and is referred to as the sublime acrobat of the Glass Bead Game. An eccentric individualist who refuses to adapt to society, he reveals deficiencies of health, balance, contentment, and self-confidence. A classical philologist, Tegularius possesses a rare intellectual gift, but his exaggerated aestheticism leads him to despair. In his neglect of meditation, he embodies a deteriorating Castalia that places too much emphasis on outward form and ritual and too little on the contemplative and integrating factors necessary for achieving harmony and the unio mystica.

Father Jacobus

Father Jacobus, the foremost historian and monk of the Benedictine Order. A scholar, seer, and sage who is an activist and practical statesman influential in Rome, he is responsible for teaching young Knecht the importance of history. In contrast to the sterile pursuit of the history of ideas and art as frequently practiced in Castalia, Jacobus posits a historical perspective full of chaos and of conflict between good and evil, yet one that preserves faith in order and meaning. In interacting with Knecht, he attempts to enlighten but not proselytize, and thus he displays a genuine sense of understanding the value and importance of the individual’s independence in fostering his or her own development.

Thomas von der Trave

Thomas von der Trave, the Master of the Game prior to Knecht. A great exponent of classical form and irony, he represents the ultimate master and Castalian. Thomas, who is famous, well-traveled and cosmopolitan, and gracious and obliging, fanatically guards the Game against all contamination of its traditional principles.

Carlo Ferromonte

Carlo Ferromonte, a fellow student and friend of Knecht who rises to the second-highest rank of the Board, a hardworking, practical pedantic devoid of any mystical proclivities. He supports the side of natural life as opposed to Knecht and Castalia’s cultivation of the mind. Ferromonte contributes to Knecht’s awakening in warning him of the dangers and risks of a sterile life based solely on mind. In returning to the outside world, Ferromonte expresses his gratitude for the benefits that life in Castalia has afforded him but demonstrates that, for him, remaining there is an escape from real life.

The Elder Brother

The Elder Brother, the founder of the Chinese hermitage where Knecht once briefly studied. He pursues Oriental studies with an ardor that reveals flight from reality rather than acceptance of it.

Tito

Tito (TEE-toh), the temperamental son of Plinio and Madame Designori, who experiences a love-hate relationship with his father. When Knecht is summoned to tutor him, Tito gradually recognizes his noble and innate aristocratic qualities and leadership potential. His emergence from the water as the fully awakened Knecht dies symbolizes his first step along the path of achieving his full potential.

Bertram

Bertram, the deputy of the Magister Ludi, who lacks luck but not talent or goodwill. He provisionally administers the annual Game in the stead of the ailing Thomas.

Plinius Ziegenhals

Plinius Ziegenhals (PLIH-nee-ews ZEE-eh-gehn-halz), a scholar and historian of literature during the earlier bourgeois Age of the Feuilleton. He is credited with establishing the Order of the Glass Bead Game.

Bastian Perrot

Bastian Perrot, an eccentric, clever, sociable, and humane musicologist, most likely a member of the Journeyers to the East. He invents the abacus-like bead-strung wires from which the Glass Bead Game derives its name.

Lusor “Joculator” Basiliensis

Lusor “Joculator” Basiliensis (bah-sihl-ee-EHN-sihs), the Swiss musicologist who brought the Game to the verge of its capacity for universal application. He represents the quintessence of intellectualism and art and is responsible in the history of the Game for developing it to integrate mathematical and musical principles.

Otto Zbingden

Otto Zbingden, the sixty-year-old headmaster of Waldzell, an eccentric who inspires fear. Through his notes, much of the documentation concerning Knecht’s development has been preserved.

Alexander

Alexander, a master of meditation and deputy of the Order who eventually becomes the new president. He is a strong-willed, disciplined individual with whom Knecht discusses his request for leave from Castalia. As a representative of the status quo, Alexander defends a Castalia that in Knecht’s mind is in need of rejuvenation.

Through a complex literary style that places The Glass Bead Game squarely in the modernist camp, Hesse gives first attention not to Knecht, the subject of the biography, but to the narrator composing the biography for the reader. This narrator, by the careful use of detail and by reporting only incidents supported or at least hinted at in the Castalian records (including Knecht’s own writings) comes to life for the reader as the novel progresses through Knecht’s career. It is the narrator’s duty to describe Castalian life as Knecht lived it and to do so in the measured, neutral tones appropriate to the principles of Castalian intellectual discourse. Nevertheless, the narrator reveals an affection for and an indebtedness to Joseph Knecht that, together with a hint at the very end of the novel, suggest that Tito, the young son of Plinio, grows up to become a Magister Ludi and is, in fact, the narrator himself.

The object of the narrator’s biography, however, is the central figure in the novel. Joseph Knecht is more than the sum of his accomplishments as listed by his biographer, because Hesse’s style offers ironical interpretations of the events in the story. What is reported as warm discussion is understood by the reader to have been heated argument; what is described as an inquisitive and curious temperament is understood by the reader to be a bold, questioning, even challenging, young student spirit, one which must be tamed from time to time by the even-tempered admonishments of his tutors. Knecht’s resistance to but eventual fascination with the Glass Bead Game is interpreted by the careful reader as the reluctance of the normal, bright student to sacrifice the pleasures of youthful arrogance to the sedulous study of orderly disciplines, along with the kind of grudging admission of the value of knowledge that comes only with maturity. Part of Knecht’s success in Castalia is a result of the combination of quickness of mind and independence of spirit, neither of which alone makes genius. In short, Knecht (whose name means “servant”) is anything but a servant: He is a student Everyman, perhaps more intelligent than most but with the same eagerness to know everything, to experience everything, to live every life (while at the same time knowing that childish things must eventually be put away in deference to the complexities and demands of reality). Knecht is more than a three-dimensional, psychologically believable person: He stands for the inquiring mind as it passes through the stages of adolescence and youth (what is called the flos juventutis or the “flow of youth”) into a growing maturity and responsibility. Insofar as biographers have recounted Hesse’s education at special schools with increasingly greater concentration on the arts, Knecht can be seen as a thinly disguised, fanciful, idealized, but still accurate, portrait of the author.

The support characters to Knecht’s Bildungsroman constitute the cast of a roman a clef, as so many scholars have noted. Each major contact along Knecht’s path toward mastery of the Glass Bead Game shows three sides: the fictive personality, who answers to psychological characterization; the Hegelian representative of an argumentative thesis or antithesis; and the actual contemporary or historical figure whom Hesse honors or mocks by placing him in the novel.

Easily recognizable are the pair of Pater Jacobus and Fritz Tegularius, representing the two opposing sides of the ongoing struggle between body and mind. Jacobus, a Benedictine devoted to earthly good works, is a portrait of the philosopher Jacob Burckhardt, who influenced Hesse’s later philosophical views. His opponent, Fritz Tegularius (a portrait of the hypertense Friedrich Nietzsche), is all mind, the ideal of Castalian scholarship and intellectualization. More difficult to discern is the duality of Plinio Designori and the Elder Brother, the first a man of the world and the second an Oriental contemplative given over to the impressionistic instructions of the I Ching. Designori is more than a mere spokesperson for the secular pleasures of free enterprise. He has yet to be identified in the roman a clef matrix and represents for Knecht an alternative to Castalian life itself, a return to the realities of nonelitism, an alternative that Knecht eventually chooses. By denying a name to the Elder Brother (a composite of the Eastern philosophers whom Hesse studied during his research for earlier novels), Hesse further abstracts his meditative nature, reducing him to yet another alternative for Knecht, a retreat into a totally unrealistic existence. Thomas von der Trave is acknowledged to be a tribute to Hesse’s contemporary, Thomas Mann, whose novel Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus, 1948) bears undeniable similarities to The Glass Bead Game. Finally, the Magister Musicae may be Hesse’s homage to any number of historical geniuses, from Johann Sebastian Bach to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Ludwig van Beethoven.