[citation needed] The novel is an example of a Bildungsroman, following the life of a distinguished member of the Castalian Order, Joseph Knecht, whose surname means "servant" and is cognate with the English word knight.

At the prestigious school Waldzell, Knecht develops another meaningful friendship with Plinio Designori, a student from a politically influential family, who is studying in Castalia as a guest.

Although educated in Castalia, Knecht's path to "Magister Ludi" is atypical for the order, as he spends much of his time after graduation outside the province's boundaries.

As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the order, gradually coming to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life's big problems.

Knecht, too, comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal and protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits but oblivious to the problems of life outside its borders.

The heads of the order deny his request, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend Designori's energetic and strong-willed son, Tito.

In a cold fury, he kills his half-brother and finds himself once again in the forest with the old yogi, who, through an experience of an alternate life, guides him on the spiritual path and out of the world of illusion (Maya).

This Knecht has been born some dozen years after the Treaty of Rijswijk in the time of Eberhard Ludwig, and in depicting the other characters Hesse draws heavily on actual biographies: Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, Johann Friedrich Rock, Johann Albrecht Bengel and Nicolaus Zinzendorf make up the cast of Pietist mentors.

It forms part of a large and prosperous state whose leaders are broadly but not uncritically sympathetic to the Castalian ideal of scholarship.

Another is the advancement of learning, primarily in the fields of mathematics, musicology (of Western music up to the 18th century), philology, and the history of art.

[10] The Glass Bead Game is "a kind of synthesis of human learning"[11] in which themes, such as a musical phrase or a philosophical thought, are stated.

[15] The name of the pedagogic province in the story is taken from Greek legend of the nymph Castalia, who was transformed into an inspiration-granting fountain by the god Apollo.

In his biography of Hesse, Freedman wrote that the tensions caused by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of The Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times.

[16] "The educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his own antidote to the crises of his time.

"[16] According to Freedman, in the Glass Bead Game, "contemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life into a unifying design.