The main protagonist in The Breast, David Kepesh, investigates all possibilities of the cause of his bizarre metamorphosis. He intellectually agonizes over his grotesque situation and feels imprisoned by it. He consults with Dr.

Gordon, his physician, whose scientific explanations depict it as an irregular occurrence of nature. Kepesh turns to Dr. Klinger, a psychiatrist, just as Portnoy did. However, Dr. Klinger is an anti-apocalyptic listener, a rational realist who objectively clings to the facts of reality and sees the possibility of salvation for Kepesh in the acceptance of his grotesque self. Similarly, Claire Ovington, his mistress, accepts him as he is and offers him a relatively stable life after his ordeal of a broken marriage and five years of painful psychoanalysis. Arthur Schonbrunn, a stodgy and pedantic colleague of Kepesh, also insists on exact adherence to rules of reality.