Stanley Morris, a winsome, aging professor of writing and literature, secure in his context as a loyalist in his university, discovers he has cancer of the prostate. This strikes him as absurd, not to mention unbelievable. He immediately decides to have it removed, and goes through the preliminary tests and giving of blood, which sequence becomes a theater of the absurd. As he is coming back into consciousness after the operation, his mind and imagination are filled with images and memories of these who have died before him - his half-brother, his mother. Back at home, with his wife's support, he tries to recover his old "self," his identity as a person and a teacher. When he goes back to the campus, he slowly becomes engaged again in the life of his university and accepts a new challenge from the incoming woman dean.