Destiny and the idea of being chosen

Destiny and the idea of being chosen link Domenico Onofrio Tempesta’s account of his rise to Dominick Birdsey’s struggle to understand his brother’s illness. The concept gives chance a personal meaning: a sudden opportunity can appear to confirm that a life is being guided toward a purpose. But the novel also tests that conviction against what no promise or force of will can change. Domenico presents himself as selected for a destined life; Dominick is urged to accept that neither fate nor personal power makes him responsible for controlling Thomas Birdsey’s course.

Ambition and the Opening of an Opportunity

In Domenico’s account, destiny becomes a reason to act when an opportunity appears. He recalls that Flynn fired Pasquale Tempesta while retaining another worker, an injustice that still angers him. Under other circumstances, Domenico might have protested or quit the mill in defense of family dignity. Instead, he frames readiness to pursue his destiny as more important than leaving in protest. The difference is consequential: his sense of a larger future changes how he responds to an immediate wrong.

The opportunity he sees is concrete rather than abstract. A newspaper reports that the city of Three Rivers will divide the hill property belonging to Rosemark’s widow into city lots, with a new road and the name Hollyhock Avenue chosen for the street. The lots are expected to sell for five or six hundred dollars each. Domenico has saved twelve hundred dollars and recognizes that he will need that money, and more, to pursue the possibility. His claim to destiny thus begins in calculation as well as conviction: he has noticed a change in the local land market, accumulated savings, and decided to treat the opening as a summons to act.

Inheritance and the Chosen Self

After seeing his house and land, Domenico imagines his father, whose life was spent laboring in the hot, dirty sulphur mines of Giuliana, standing beside him in Connecticut. In this imagined scene, his father would see what he has achieved and respond with pride and disbelief. Yet Domenico distinguishes that paternal inheritance from the feeling he experiences in himself. He describes his achievement through Ciccia blood, his mother’s people, whom he identifies as landowners like himself. Family history therefore supplies two different measures of identity: the remembered labor of his father and the inherited association with ownership on his mother’s side.

Domenico then enlarges that sense of inheritance into a claim of election, presenting himself as a man chosen by the Vergine. The claim turns a particular achievement—the house and land—into evidence of a larger design. His ancestry, his timing, and his acquisition of property become parts of a story in which he is not merely someone who acted on an opening but someone selected for it. The narrative preserves this as Domenico’s self-understanding, not as confirmation that supernatural selection caused his success. His account makes the distinction between opportunity and destiny difficult to maintain: the land transaction is real, while its meaning as proof of election belongs to his interpretation.

Dominick and the Limits of Control

The idea returns in Dominick’s therapy when his therapist recalls that he has described himself as fate’s test case. She connects that self-description to his criticism of his grandfather’s delusions of grandeur, suggesting that the resemblance between them may include more than family history. The comparison places Domenico’s chosen identity beside Dominick’s own way of interpreting his life. What appears to Dominick as an exceptional burden may also carry the same wish to understand events as directed toward, or organized around, a particular person.

His therapist challenges the premise that Dominick can command the forces shaping his family. Thomas has become schizophrenic while Dominick has not; the therapist describes the difference as the result of God, fate, or random selection. Thomas is at Hatch for the coming year because the state considers that the appropriate place for him. Whatever promises Dominick has made, she argues, they cannot determine these outcomes. Her point is not that the differences are unimportant, but that Dominick’s responsibility for his brother does not give him control over the illness or the state’s decisions.

The River and the Reversal of Election

When Dominick’s claims to unusual power arise in the conversation, his therapist asks him to demonstrate his ability to direct events. The challenge is pointed rather than a literal test: it exposes the gap between a feeling of responsibility and the power to alter what happens. She asks him to imagine commanding a river to abandon its inevitable course. The image replaces destiny as personal command with a course that cannot be bent to an individual wish.

The river metaphor gives the concept its counterweight. If Domenico’s story converts a land purchase into evidence that he was chosen, Dominick’s therapist resists converting family suffering into proof that he can control its outcome. Acknowledging limits, she tells him, can help him become well and free him. The contrast does not settle whether fate, chance, or divine purpose governs events. Instead, it shows the different consequences of believing in selection: for Domenico, the belief intensifies ambition and magnifies success; for Dominick, relinquishing imagined mastery offers a way to live with what he cannot direct.