Sexual consent and entitlement

Sexual consent and entitlement are exposed through a pattern in which Dominick treats his own desire, frustration, and sense of grievance as reasons to override another person’s refusal. His treatment of Dessa becomes a turning point not because he immediately understands it, but because the narrative makes him confront the difference between claiming to love someone and respecting her autonomy.

Entitlement, Coercion, and Recognition

At the Dial-Tone Lounge parking lot, Dominick arrives after driving through heavy rain and waiting for hours while Dessa works. He treats the time he has spent waiting as grounds for intimacy, even after she says she is not in the mood and tells him to stop. He frames her refusal as stubbornness and focuses on his anger at her father, allowing resentment and sexual entitlement to displace attention to what Dessa is communicating. Afterward, he minimizes what happened as having lost control because he wanted her; Dessa identifies the encounter as rape. The difference between his excuse and her naming of the harm makes consent the scene’s central conflict.

Dominick’s later recollection of being groped by an older stranger gives the episode a further, unsettling connection. As Leo recounts Thomas’s encounter with the man, Dominick remembers that the man had ignored his own request to stop. He then recalls Dessa’s fear and protest from the previous night, initially insisting to himself that the two situations were not alike. The juxtaposition does not erase the difference between the events; it shows Dominick resisting recognition even as the parallel forces him to confront the boundary he crossed. His own experience of having his refusal disregarded offers no justification for disregarding Dessa’s: it sharpens the contradiction between what he knows as a victim and what he permits himself as a partner.

Inherited Scripts of Masculinity and Control

Dominick’s behavior toward Dessa develops against a childhood in which Ray’s bullying made vulnerability dangerous. Ray was described as more prone to shouting than hitting, but he shamed the boys and taunted them when they failed to meet his standards of masculinity. Dominick remembers learning to play defense: he concealed his fear, met Ray’s gaze, and tried to avoid becoming the weaker target. As a child, he imagined a heroic father arriving to rescue the family and punish Ray; later, he gave up that fantasy and began provoking Ray himself in small ways. The shift from waiting for rescue to managing danger through defiance helps explain the habits of control surrounding Dominick’s later intimacy, without excusing his disregard for Dessa’s refusal.

Dominick also recognizes that his self-protection came at Thomas’s expense: he deliberately presented his twin as the weaker brother to divert Ray’s attention from himself. That admission connects household power to the scene with Dessa through a recurring pattern of treating another person’s vulnerability as something to exploit or manage. The novel’s contrast is consequential: Dominick knows from experience what it means to have fear and refusal disregarded, yet he does not initially let that knowledge govern his conduct as a partner. His claim to love Dessa cannot undo the coercion; recognition begins only when the gap between his own experience and his actions becomes difficult to deny.

Bodily Vulnerability and the Limits of Entitlement

The novel places Dominick’s coercion of Dessa beside a different scene of bodily exposure without treating the incidents as equivalent. After a day of work and Dell Weeks’s humiliation, Thomas breaks down, sobs, and pulls his clothes down while demanding that Dell leave him alone. The moment presents exposure as a sign of distress, not permission: a person’s body can become the site where another person’s power is felt, even when the response itself is confused or self-directed. Against that wider pattern of vulnerability, Dominick’s failure is not simply that he misreads Dessa’s desire; it is that he treats his own need as more authoritative than her expressed boundary.

Bodily Agency and the Limits of Control

Ray’s response to Thomas’s hand amputation extends the novel’s concern with bodily vulnerability beyond Dominick and Dessa. Ray says that his wartime experience changed him, recalling that he had seen a man killed in Italy; Thomas’s voluntary act at the library brings that memory back to him. He knows Thomas is mentally ill, yet remains distressed that Thomas chose to injure himself. The episode does not equate Ray’s reaction with Dominick’s coercion of Dessa, but it places both within a story attentive to who can make decisions about another person’s body—and to how fear, injury, and the desire for control can complicate that question.