The first section of Conroy’s novel offers a survey of the life and worldview of Conroy’s narrator and protagonist, Will McLean. McLean wears a ring that signifies that he is a graduate of the Carolina Military Institute, a fictional all-male military college based in Charleston, South Carolina. He often revisits the city and the school, aware of the rich history of each: both Edgar Allan Poe and the Seminole chief Osceola passed through the area, adding to its local mythology. However, McLean’s real purpose is to explain the personal, intimate significance of his time at the Institute. For this retrospective narrator, life at the college was a powerful, formative experience.

McLean’s parents were from Georgia. His father was a fiery-tempered man who attended the Institute and then fought in the Pacific Theater of World War II, while his mother was a calm yet strong-willed woman. A sense of family duty drove McLean to enroll in his father’s alma mater. As McLean explains, Institute life shaped him by the its harshness, molding him into an individual who could not truly be tamed and compelling him to write a history of the Institute that would be brutal yet valuable in its honesty.