The unnamed narrator introduces Henry Haller as a quiet, intellectual tenant lodging at his aunt's boarding house.

Haller spots an illuminated sign advertising a Magic Theater for madmen only on a wall in an old district of town.

A mysterious stranger hands Haller a small booklet titled Treatise on the Steppenwolf in the street.

Haller reads the treatise, which describes his life with shocking accuracy but mocks the seriousness of his suffering.

Haller openly criticizes a portrait of Goethe at the professor's dinner, offending the professor's wife and causing a scene.

After leaving the professor's home planning to end his life, Haller instead wanders into the Black Eagle bar.

Haller meets Hermine at the Black Eagle, a young woman who commands him to eat, drink, and rest.

Hermine lays out her plan: she will make Haller fall in love with her, then command him to kill her.

Hermine takes Haller dancing at the Balance Hotel, where he successfully dances with another woman for the first time.

Haller returns home to find Maria in his bed, a gift arranged by Hermine, and they begin a sexual relationship.

Haller recognizes his childhood friend Herman at the Fancy Dress Ball, and the person reveals herself to be Hermine in disguise.

Pablo leads Haller and Hermine to the Magic Theater and shows Haller his own tormented reflection in a small mirror.

Inside the Magic Theater, a chess player takes fragments of Haller's many selves and arranges them as pieces for magical games.

Haller discovers Hermine and Pablo nude together inside the Magic Theater and stabs Hermine through the heart.

A court sentences Haller to eternal life for lacking humor; Mozart transforms into Pablo and shrinks Hermine into a chess piece.

Steppenwolf follows Harry Haller, a reclusive intellectual approaching fifty, as he spirals through self-loathing and suicidal despair before a series of unlikely encounters forces him to confront the fragmented nature of his identity. A mysterious treatise describes his psychology with startling accuracy, and a disastrous dinner with a professor friend pushes him to the edge before he stumbles into the Black Eagle bar. There he meets Hermine, a young woman who takes command of his life, teaching him to dance, introducing him to new friends, and ultimately drawing him into love. Her gift of Maria as a lover and her own growing hold over Haller prepare him for the climactic Fancy Dress Ball, where his world is transformed. Pablo leads Haller and Hermine into the hallucinatory Magic Theater, where Haller explores his own psyche through a series of surreal doors before killing Hermine in a fit of possessive love. A dream-court sentences him to eternal life for failing to laugh, and the experience ends with Haller shaken but newly determined to master the game of living.

Harry Haller's journey from suicidal isolation to the threshold of self-understanding.

The narrator attends a public lecture with Haller and sees him wear a deeply sad, knowing expression at society's performance.

Haller drinks Elsasser wine and eats liver at a tavern, feeling the elusive golden thread of meaning briefly return.

While searching for the Magic Theater sign, Haller comes across a funeral procession and is amused by the mourners' false grief.

The man who gave Haller the treatise reappears at the funeral but ignores Haller and suggests he visit the Black Eagle bar.

At the Black Eagle, Haller dreams of meeting Goethe, who dances and jokes that eternity lasts only long enough for a laugh.

Hermine arranges a room for Haller at the Black Eagle so he can sleep safely away from the razor waiting at home.

Haller buys orchids and meets Hermine for their Tuesday dinner, eventually guessing her name by noticing she resembles his friend Herman.

Hermine insists she and Haller visit many shops before settling on the best gramophone for his dance practice.

Hermine introduces Haller to Pablo, a highly gifted jazz saxophonist, during their evening at the Balance Hotel.

Pablo gives Haller cocaine on a day when Haller grows irritable, and the two men gradually grow closer.

Hermine visits Haller the night before the ball and says people like them yearn for death as a return to eternity.

Before heading to the ball, Haller visits a cinema and watches a film of The Old Testament, noting its cultural irony.

Haller misplaces his coat-check ticket at the Fancy Dress Ball and receives a replacement mysteriously labelled Magic Theater.

Inside the Magic Theater, Haller enters a door and finds himself in a violent war against machines alongside his old friend Gustav.

After the Magic Theater experience ends, Haller feels invigorated and certain he will return to try the game of life again.

While the main arc of Steppenwolf centres on Haller's dramatic encounters with Hermine and the Magic Theater, a quieter layer of events shapes his transformation. Before Hermine enters his life, Haller drifts through bars, funerals, and cinemas, catching fleeting glimpses of meaning and repeatedly failing to hold onto them. His friendship with Pablo develops slowly and awkwardly, built through shared drugs and reluctant conversations rather than immediate rapport. The social rituals surrounding the Fancy Dress Ball — the gramophone shopping, the night-before visits, the coat-check mishap — reveal how Haller is painstakingly learning to participate in a world he once dismissed entirely. Inside the Magic Theater, he fights in an absurd war against machines, a vision that crystallises his lifelong conflict with modernity. The pool closes with Haller emerging from the Theater with a hard-won sense of purpose, carrying new chess pieces and the faint outline of a man who might one day learn to laugh.

The supporting encounters and smaller discoveries that quietly shaped Haller's path.

The narrator discovers Haller's manuscript after Haller departs and decides to share it as a document of modern suffering.

Haller reads the treatise's claim that he is a suicide — one who finds relief in thoughts of death rather than in action.

Haller wakes the morning after finding the treatise, rereads it restlessly, and recalls a previous suicide attempt made with laudanum.

At the professor's dinner, Haller reveals he is the author of the anti-war article the professor had ridiculed at the table.

Hermine confesses to Haller that she despises most people as he does and recognised a kindred spirit in him at first sight.

Hermine tells Haller that learning to dance will teach him to live fully in the moment and stop repressing himself.

Hermine and Haller debate whether people have always been shallow and complacent, or whether modern life made them that way.

Haller spends days with Maria in a separate apartment and, reflecting on past memories and loves, feels briefly close to the immortals.

Pablo proposes an orgy to Haller and Maria, which Haller refuses; Pablo later smokes opium with Haller and kisses him on the eyes.

Haller and Hermine dance passionately together until dawn at the Fancy Dress Ball after she changes out of her male disguise.

Haller looks into the large mirror inside the Magic Theater and sees hundreds of fragmented versions of himself, old and young.

Haller enters a room in the Magic Theater and watches himself alternately tame and be tamed by the Steppenwolf within.

The Magic Theater takes Haller through missed and experienced romances, beginning with a girl named Rosa from his youth.

Mozart builds a radio inside the Magic Theater and plays Handel through it, telling Haller to find humor in imperfect modernity.

Mozart scolds Haller for stabbing Hermine instead of laughing at absurdity, and Haller vows he will one day learn to laugh.

Beneath Steppenwolf's plot lies a sequence of pivotal discoveries and emotional breaks that gradually dismantle Haller's fixed image of himself. The treatise forces him to confront not just his dual nature but his status as a man who hoards suicidal ideation as a comfort, and the aftermath of the disastrous professor's dinner brings that ideation to its most dangerous edge. Hermine systematically dismantles Haller's self-imposed limits — revealing herself as a mirror, insisting dance is a form of living, and challenging his conviction that modern shallowness is new. Pablo deepens these disruptions, refusing to rank art, offering drugs as doorways, and ultimately guiding Haller toward the unconscious. Inside the Magic Theater, the revelations accelerate: Haller sees himself as a multiplicity, watches himself both command and be commanded by his inner wolf, and relives the repressed romances of a lifetime. The pool closes with Mozart's rebuke and Haller's vow to one day laugh, marking the incomplete but irreversible beginning of his transformation.

The revelations and inner shifts that redefine who Harry Haller believes himself to be.