protagonist Neil Klugman is involved in a struggle to develop and preserve an
identity of his own amid different environments and conflicting impulses within
himself. Throughout the story he makes love to Brenda Patimkin and tries to find
a role for himself in society that corresponds to what he regards as his own, unique
self. In the process he loses Brenda, but he refuses to compromise and surrender
what he regards as his integrity. As a modern, liberal intellectual living in the
conservative American society of the 1950s, he identifies with a set of secular and
rationalistic values that bring him into conflict with the world around him. He
represents the third generation of a Jewish immigrant group that has experienced
great changes and transitions, and his milieu is basically working class or lower
middle class and strongly colored by traditional Jewish ethnic attitudes and customs.
He himself is a librarian with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and an assimilationist
approach to American society.1