Moritz finds himself again on the verge of school failure. While reading Johann Wolfgang Goethe’sFaust (1790) with Melchior, he relates his grandmother’s story of the headless queen, a tale that has long haunted him. It tells of a beautiful queen born without a head who is one day conquered by a king who happens to be provided with two heads that argue constantly. The court wizard gives one of the king’s heads to the queen, on whom it proves very becoming, and the two are married with great joy, the heads now being on the best of terms. Mrs. Gabor, Melchior’s mother, enters with tea and words of encouragement for Moritz. Noticing the copy of Faust, she wonders if they ought to be reading it, saying elliptically that she prefers to place her trust in Melchior rather than in pedagogical principles. Realizing that she is thinking of the Gretchen episode in Goethe’s play, they become annoyed, Melchior because everyone insists on acting as if the world turns on nothing but obscenities, Moritz because he has begun to fear that it actually does. He has received Melchior’s essay on sex, which has affected him like a series of dim recollections. He is disposed to exalt the satisfaction experienced by the woman and to regard that of the man as insipid.

Meanwhile, Wendla persistently interrogates her mother on the subject of her sister’s latest baby. She mocks her mother’s silly fairy tales about how babies are made by pretending to see a ridiculous vision outside the window. At Wendla’s insistence, Mrs. Bergmann is forced to begin telling her daughter the truth, but she manages to evade the issue by saying that the things required to make a baby are marriage and a capacity for love that Wendla is too young to comprehend. A short time later, Wendla goes looking for Melchior and, swayed by his intensity and his tortured insistence that there is no such thing as love, she remains with him in the hayloft, where they have sex and she conceives a child.

Moritz finally reaches the end of his resources and, at the brink of suicide over the realization that he is about to fail at school, writes to Mrs. Gabor to ask for a loan that will enable him to leave home. She considers it her duty to refuse; she attempts to appeal to his common sense and better nature. At dusk, in a parting soliloquy pervaded by his unfailing wry humor mixed with self-pity, he concludes that life is not his responsibility. The headless queen beckons. Life is a matter of taste. His only regret is that he has not known sexual fulfillment, the most human experience of all. When Ilse, a young model with an insatiable appetite for life, appears and tempts him with tales of her warm, carefree, animal existence, he wavers, but then he rejects the opportunity she offers. Moritz shoots himself and dies. Later, Ilse discovers the pistol he used and conceals it.

Moritz’s suicide precipitates an investigation by school officials. Melchior, charged with indecency on the basis of the notes on sex he had written, which are discovered among Moritz’s books, becomes the scapegoat. At the funeral service, the adults condemn Moritz for his crime against humanity and God. Rentier Stiefel, Moritz’s father, comforts himself by repeating that he never cared for the boy; he was no son of his. With consummate coarseness, the pastor urges Stiefel to seek comfort in the arms of his wife. While the reaction of the schoolboys at the funeral is largely one of curiosity as to the exact manner of the suicide, Martha and Ilse bring a profusion of flowers to the grave.

Mrs. Gabor indignantly opposes her husband’s decision to send Melchior to the reformatory. She defies anyone to perceive moral corruption in what the boy had written, but she is unable to stand up to the discovery that Melchior is responsible for Wendla’s pregnancy. After undergoing various treatments concocted by Dr. Von Brausepulver and mother Schmidt for inducing abortion, Wendla dies. After her death, Melchior, hounded by society and by his own self-contempt, manages to return to look at her grave. As he wanders enviously in the cemetery, he encounters Moritz Stiefel, his head tucked under his arm. Moritz attempts to persuade Melchior to join him in his life among the dead, which he depicts as a fabulous if grotesque freedom. While Melchior hesitates, a masked man appears to take Moritz to task for his attempt, his lack of a head, and his general crumbling condition. The masked man accuses Moritz of charlatanism and asks Melchior to submit himself to his care. Melchior, contending that he cannot entrust himself to a masked unknown, interrogates the man regarding his moral position. Moritz admits that he has been boasting and urges Melchior to accompany the gentleman, who is, in any event, alive. The two living beings withdraw together while Moritz returns to warm himself with putrefaction.