They are joined by the family's hostess, socialite Louise von Louwe, and by Robin Tripp, a charismatic young television host who is courting Anne.

[2] The would-be cabinet member also faces inquest from his old mentor and tutor in theology, Henry Kuykendall, who, in his old age, has taken to running a mission to the poor in Harlem.

Most of all, however, he is trying himself.’[3] In the wake of his television appearance, which is seen as a disaster by his advisors, Gibbs visits Sylvia Tripp to seek forgiveness and clarity over the death of her husband, and his own involvement in it.

There he receives a sort of absolution, with the revelation that Rudy's mounting sense of self-loathing and personal failure, accumulated over many years, was the real cause for his suicide.

Critic Dale Brown notes its ‘autobiographical texture’,[5] and the development of recurring Buechnerian themes such as ‘heroism in spite of handicap’,[6] the ‘rejection of sterile inaction and apathy’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘doubt’, and ‘the courage required to assert one’s humanity in the modern world’.

Twenty-two years later in a novel called The Return of Ansel Gibbs I told a very brief and fictionalized version of my father's death, and the most accurate word I can find to describe my mother's reaction to it is fury.

There is an introspective understanding of the struggle of the human soul that is as unusual as it is refreshing.’[15] Indeed, the character of Gibbs would draw comment from several reviewers and critics, including A.C. Speckorsky, who wrote of Gibbs: 'Behind his demeanour of blandly impassive detachment there is a man in the throes of a crisis of confidence, of nerve, and of faith, a man involved in a searching attempt to grapple with the fundamental issues of men and morals, of civilization and government – and his involvement with them.

He is almost incapable of passion (sobriety, judiciousness, detachment, moderation, tolerance being the civilized virtues), and he can no more satisfy his old teacher’s demand that he become a prophet than he can prate sentimentally like the senator about Mom’s apple pie.