Previous Condition - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Back from Chicago where he was working, Peter is now in New York City. His friend Jules lets him stay in a room he is renting in a white neighbourhood; despite hiding, Peter is eventually found out by the other neighbours and the landlady. She evicts him, and he goes back to Jules's, who says he will let him stay at his place. Jules and Peter engage in a long philosophical discussion about the nature of Blackness and Jewishness in America. Later, he goes to dinner with his friend Ida, who suggests suing the landlady, but he prefers not to. He then leaves, takes the subway, and goes to a black bar where he buys a drink for two women.

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