Pages 622-716 Summary and Analysis

Mitchell said that Joe Gould, the main focus of the final story, "Joe Gould's Secret," was a misfit. He lived and acted the part of a bum though he had been educated in Harvard. He said that his family had been important in his home town but that he'd never felt at home until he moved to New York where he could become completely lost among the misfits. Gould was writing an extensive work he called "An Oral History of Our Time." He predicted that someday people would read this work in order to figure out what had happened to humanity, just as people often read "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in order to figure out what happened to the Romans. Toward that end, he specified in his will that all his manuscripts be gathered together and...