The unnamed narrator is a scholarship student at the prep school. He is from a working-class family in Seattle. His mother has died, and his father is consumed by grief.

On campus, he is a member of the literary crowd. He dreams of being a successful writer and carries a persona that exudes literary affectations. However, he hopes to attend a college where he can escape this persona while still seriously pursuing writerly ambitions.

He has a strong competitive spirit, and prior to entering his school’s writing contests he considers the strengths and weaknesses in his friends’ writing. In his own work, he struggles to write anything about his lived experience. For the Hemingway contest, he greatly desires to write what is true, even if this reveals him to be weak and vulnerable, but he doesn’t manage to get anything on the page. He then plagiarizes a story written by a girl from a nearby school. The story captivates him because he believes it truthfully captures his experience. He submits it for the contest and wins.

He is soon expelled for plagiarism, but he still feels, at least in part, that the story is his own. He goes to New York and works various jobs before eventually joining the military.