Fate and chance

Fate and chance is the novel’s recurring problem of how to understand suffering when some losses appear causeless and some wounds are entangled with personal responsibility. Dominick Birdsey moves between the wish to find a pattern and the suspicion that no higher power is balancing the accounts. The tension becomes most acute when he confronts deaths he could not prevent, relationships damaged by his own conduct, and a brother whose religious certainty arises from illness rather than revelation.

Arbitrary Suffering and the Search for a Pattern

In a conversation about the Book of Job, Dominick compares himself to a man who is trying to do right and is nevertheless made to suffer. He does not accept the religious premise behind the comparison: he tells his therapist that he does not believe in God. Yet the story of Job gives form to his sense that his life has become a test imposed without explanation. He names the hardships accumulating around him—Thomas Birdsey’s schizophrenia, his baby daughter’s death, and trouble in his relationship with Joy—and describes himself as a possible test case of fate instead.

The therapist’s answer does not promise that suffering has a hidden purpose. She allows that events can happen irrespective of how people conduct their lives, while also leaving room for circumstances in which their conduct matters. That distinction is central to the concept: chance and responsibility are not mutually exclusive explanations. Dominick wants a single account that will make the losses add up, but the conversation offers no reliable moral ledger. His recognition that hardship may be arbitrary unsettles the idea that patience, goodness, or belief will necessarily protect anyone from it.

Fate as Resignation and Dark Humor

At a low point, Dominick imagines sleeping through the remainder of his life, waking only after the people he knows are gone and Joy’s expected child has grown up. Because sleep brings dreams of dead monkeys and dead brothers, even escape through sleep seems unavailable. He considers suicide, but rejects making a violent spectacle of it; Joy’s pregnancy and betrayal do not, in his view, give him the right to damage her life further. The passage shows fate not as a serene acceptance of events but as a pressure that narrows his imagined choices until he sees only endurance or death.

His bleak humor briefly offers another way to endure. With a roommate repeatedly apologizing for passing gas, Dominick wonders whether he might simply remain in bed and be suffocated by the situation. The joke does not resolve his crisis; it lets him momentarily turn despair into something absurd rather than act on it. Later, after Joy asks what he finds funny, he wipes away tears and thinks about the advice to believe in fate and go with the flow. He sees the advice as a ready-made philosophy that can sound empty beside actual suffering. The image of going with the flow turns sharply toward drowning: surrender may be described as wisdom, but it can also mean being carried under.

Randomness, Consequence, and Self-Blame

Dominick’s broadest rejection of cosmic fairness comes when he concludes that no one above is ensuring that events balance properly. The conclusion joins losses that he experiences differently. Angela’s death has no particular reason behind it; his marriage, by contrast, did not end independently of his actions. He recognizes that he had consumed the emotional space in the relationship, while also admitting that he displaced blame onto his wife and concealed the circumstances of his own affair. Chance explains neither all consequences nor all guilt: the novel places an apparently senseless death beside a separation for which Dominick can identify his own part.

This collision gives his fatalism its instability. When he treats everything as a joke, he is not making a considered claim that human actions never matter. He is trying to respond to a world in which the death of a child cannot be repaired by finding a reason, even as his own choices remain available for judgment. His desire to escape responsibility and his recognition of it coexist. Fate can become an excuse, but the details he recalls repeatedly interrupt that excuse.

The Family Story and the Limits of Providence

A historical episode in Sicily gives the theme a different scale. In March 1898, Mount Etna’s activity precedes the collapse of a sulphur mine in the hills. Domenico Onofrio Tempesta’s father and brother are among the miners killed with eleven others; Pasquale, who is at the kiln when the shaking begins, survives. The difference between those inside the collapsing section and the person elsewhere is a matter of circumstance, not demonstrated merit. In Domenico’s account, grief turns toward the earth itself, which has swallowed lives before their time. The episode offers no assurance that suffering falls according to a just design.

Across these experiences, fate is a question the characters pose rather than an answer the narrative confirms. Thomas’s belief in a god who assigns him a mission belongs to his schizophrenia, not to proof of supernatural order. Dominick can see the damage in treating his brother’s delusions as evidence that the universe has selected or explained him. At the same time, Dominick’s own despair tempts him to interpret unrelated misfortunes as a single cosmic joke. The novel holds those impulses in tension: people make meaning from suffering, but meaning does not establish that suffering was deserved, chosen, or sent for a purpose.