Joe Pitts, a brilliant if somewhat obsessive and cynical graduate student from a wealthy dysfunctional family lashes out under pressure against what he sees as the hypocrisy of society and the futility of his life in it. Briefly committed to a psychiatric ward in the aftermath of an altercation with one of his professors, he meets Dr. Margaret Wright, a resident and Susan Holland, a somewhat mystical nursing student. Just as Joe begins to believe that his intellect and his Ego can overcome what he sees as a minor troubling interlude in his life, he receives a shock. It is a diagnosis of terminal testicular cancer.

With the aid of Dr. Wright, Susan, Roberta Turner, a philosophical fellow student and Dr. Shultz, the very professor with whom his altercation began this odyssey, and a man whose wife has just made the final passage, Joe learns in the hospice to revere his own, now fleeting existence and gains the humility necessary to face the next and final stage of his life.