After a failed study mission in France, Abd al-Rahman returns home to Iraq to launch an existentialist movement akin to that of his hero, Jean-Paul Satre. Meanwhile, his wealth and family prestige guarantee him an idle life spent in drinking, debauchery, and frequenting a well-known nightclub. But soon he is contemplating suicide as an act of philosophical despair. A biographer chosen by his presumed friends narrates the story of a somewhat bewildered young man who like other members of his generation was searching for a meaning to his life. This parody of the abuses and extravagances of pseudo-philosophers in the Baghdad of the Sixties throws into relief Iraqi intellectual and cultural life of the time.