Joseph Gillis was once called Joseph Galsky, but changed his name upon entrance to Harvard University so his lower-class Jewish upbringing wouldn't be reflected on his degree. He has superficially absorbed the rules of formality and restraint that characterize the academic world, but at his core remains loyal to his Roxbury Yiddish principles. His dueling names and natures render him in a state of 'social schizophrenia', desiring success but abhorring the inescapable maze of daily ritual and human interaction.

Joseph marries Nancy Framingham of Radcliffe College, a woman of Puritan stock who takes great interest in Joseph's clashing identities. She bemoans his lack of 'True American Guilt', determined to humble him into social submission by parading him through all sorts of Harvard student events. One such outing, a ski trip, leaves Joseph in a body cast and full of morphine. In this state he is visited by Tim, a fellow academic, who sits by his bed for six hours complaining about his cold and demanding glass after glass of warm milk from Nancy. At the end of the night he reproves Joseph for not sympathizing about his cold, and Nancy follows suit.

Nancy finds Joseph piggish and aloof; Joseph responds that he is simply driven by forces others can't see, a devotion to God and his father and a deep critique of the academic environment in which they are submerged. His Yiddish upbringing tints all of his writing for academic reviews and magazines. One day, standing in the Harvard co-op and asking himself who he is, a voice behind answers him, 'Never ask who you are'. He jumps around to find a Harvard man who steers him to a café, reading his mind at every turn of conversation and stroking his independent-mindedness and strong ego. The man attempts to beguile Joseph into a partnership of superegos, taking over campus with the brilliance of liberated idealists. Joseph concludes he must be the devil. Leaving, he sees an old Jewish man and fells the urge to run to his feet and ask for help.

Joseph's confusion is everyone's confusion, he claims. All of Harvard's great academics come with a heaping side of lunacy; he concludes after reviewing his many professorial encounters, and they call _him _foolish. So despite his confusion he rejects the maze and finds the open door, transcending the mundane, and he entreats everyone to do the same.