 The book follows a bizarre series of events in the lives of him and his painter friends and effectively documents his descent into paranoid delusions as he becomes more and more unreliable as a narrator leaving the reader to become more and more unsure about what exactly is happening in Boston.The narrator goes on "reveries" in a public garden in which he transports himself to historical places and events.Although he has no name, he tells a young boy named Randolph several different names over the course of the book.