"The Morning Watch" explores the thoughts and feelings of 12-year-old Richard, a student at an Episcopal boarding school (based on the author's schooling at St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Sewanee, Tennessee), over the course of a few hours in the early morning of Good Friday. The protagonist is a boy (roughly myself) at edge of puberty, peak of certain kinds of hypersensitive introversion, isolation, and a certain priggishness.