Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of good joke was to lie about his age.
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Even among the men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction then all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.
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Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning - his mother, his father and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost from the moment of his birth. ... Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with the guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was NOT Henry Fonda.
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Because he needed a friend so desperately he never found one.
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Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in school. At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the Communists of beeing homosexual.