He has an interest in his family's history during the American Revolution, which in turn leads to him following his conscience and helping organize the Moratorium Day protests on Wall Street.

Over the course of the book, he accepts his identity through the loss of his Dutch Christian fiancée, a pediatrician who is killed while attending a sick kibbutznik child during a visit to Israel.

The incident leads him to immigrate to Israel and become a kibbutznik himself and join the Israeli paratroopers, in exploring the Jewish identity that had been denied to him throughout his life by his family's assimilation while being externally imposed on him.

His father disowns him for his choice of Harvard in light of President Pusey's refusal to cooperate with the McCarthy hearings, particularly after the death of his older son in the Korean War.

Daniel eventually wins his father's approval from his success and fame as a pianist, composer of a Broadway musical and conductor of two orchestras, but finds the belated acceptance meaningless after years of estrangement.

George Keller, né Gyuri Kolozsdi, enters the United States as a Hungarian refugee following the student uprising in 1956, and is granted a place in the Harvard Class of 1958.

After a lengthy speech at his 25th class reunion, where he is confronted with the human toll of his policy implementation in the Vietnam War, he commits suicide, asking Andrew Eliot, as his estate executor, to send his money back to his family in Hungary.