Chapter 1, Abduction Summary

Ferdydurke follows the story of Joey, a thirty-year-old writer who is struggling with his own immaturity. Professor Pimko turns Joey into a seventeen-year-old by "belittling" him and sends him off to a school. Joey struggles to regain his adulthood, extricating himself from a crush on a schoolgirl only to be drawn into his friend Kneadus's search for an ideal farmhand. Joey is drawn into a class struggle on his uncle's estate, where Kneadus finds his farmhand, and only finally escapes into a faked love with Zosia, his distant aunt's daughter.

The narrator, Joey, wakes up, feeling like he has to catch a train, but then realizes there's nowhere for him to go. He is overcome with fear. He dreamed of seeing himself as an adolescent boy, and the present and past "hims" ridiculed each other and therefore themselves. Though the narrator...