A young man, tired of life and love, indifferent to the people and world around him, takes up a room in a Parisienne boarding house.

Noises from the adjoining room draw his attention to a hole in the wall, and he observes its occupants through it.

He becomes obsessed with the individual episodes of human life that play out before his eyes; love, adultery, incest, childbirth, death, thievery and betrayal. Through his voyeurism, the unnamed narrator becomes an omniscient godlike character, observing the room's inhabitants in their most private and naked moments. The hole becomes a window to the very soul of humanity and the human condition.

But as with Prometheus, his godlike powers come at a cost.