Once again, Vonnegut tells his audience that everything is unraveling, and nothing can stop it. To emphasize the ineffectiveness of people's efforts to reduce some of the disorder, the main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, is a professor at Tarkington, a college located at the end of one of the Finger Lakes in Western New York. The college and its location are part of Vonnegut's inside jokes, as his alma mater is Cornell, which is also in the Finger Lakes area. Tarkington is a college for dyslexic students, but the main activities there involve sexual adventures and spying on each other. The college houses a museum of perpetual motion machines, all of which have failed, offering another of Vonnegut's cynical comments on humanity's inability to achieve its dreams.

Racism becomes evident in the story when Hartke is moved to a prison mainly populated by black inmates and operated by the Japanese. The prisoners organize a revolt and assault the town across the lake, mercilessly killing several characters already introduced in the narrative. Hartke recounts these events with a sense of detachment, which isn't unexpected given his experience in Vietnam. Once the uprising is suppressed, Hartke is unjustly accused of being the leader, as it is assumed that the black inmates couldn't have planned the riot independently.