Dolphins

Dolphins in the novel occupy an uneasy space between living animals and managed attractions: they are kept for public display, yet their individual presence unsettles the human stories built around them. Bella, one of five dolphins at the Oceanarium, becomes central to Jasper’s attempt to turn an involuntary attraction into an imagined relationship, while the facility’s shows expose how little attention visitors give the animals themselves.

Captivity and Public Display

After a violent encounter with a dolphin and a separate incident involving Calla, Jasper travels north along the coast and uses stolen identification to obtain a custodial job at the Oceanarium. Its five dolphins are part of a daily entertainment program. Bella stands out to him as the one who seems most receptive to play, and he begins to invest her with a distinct personality and a possible shared future.

The dolphins’ public role is shown through the routine of their performances. Families watch while children eat snacks, and many visitors attend to their devices rather than the animals. Jasper empties the amphitheater’s comment box each night; its suggestions, discarded with the comments themselves, ask for costumes, higher jumps, or stunts that would bring dolphins into the stands. The contrast makes the animals’ beauty and presence seem less important to the audience than novelty and spectacle. Bella’s life in the facility is not simply background to Jasper’s private story: the performances place her within a system where human amusement sets the terms of her visibility.

Projection, Performance, and Animal Agency

Jasper recasts his attraction to dolphins as a possible bond with Bella, the animal he has singled out at the Oceanarium. Although he recognizes the interspecies distance and the fact that any relationship would have to take place in water, he imagines their courtship as emotionally valuable to both of them. He says he would let Bella determine what happened, but this ethical qualification remains part of his imagined future: the evidence offers no indication that Bella shares his interpretation. His certainty that he loves her, and his relief at being able to picture a monogamous life with her, show how a story of mutual attachment helps him understand an attraction he otherwise regards as strange.

That imagined bond also complicates Jasper’s role as Bella’s caretaker. When he sees her asleep, he reads her expression through the language of human intimacy; meanwhile, he is supposed to be carrying out his work, including preparing buckets of treat fish. His persistent distraction makes the gap between his private narrative and the practical responsibilities of caring for an animal visible. Bella is present as an individual in his attention, but her own experience remains inaccessible: Jasper’s interpretation, rather than any expressed response from her, supplies the meaning of their supposed relationship.

The distinction between an animal and a human-created story about an animal becomes public when Jasper learns that Dolphin Savior (Impostor Singer) has built a hit song and singing career on Jasper’s rescue of a dolphin. The song, Saving You Saved Me, accompanies a video depicting a dolphin receiving hospital care. Now Bella is to be included in a special performance at the singer’s concert. Jasper anticipates that the event may turn her into part of a staged photo opportunity, extending the conversion of dolphins’ lives into material for human entertainment. His concern for Bella is inseparable from his own fixation, but it also makes him recognize how readily other people use dolphins as props in stories that serve them.

Captivity, Harm, and the Limits of Simulation

The novel also makes the dolphins’ confinement an explicit ethical concern. Tiny distinguishes private resentment from harmful conduct when confronting an Oceanarium worker over abuse of a dolphin. He argues that the animals already live under imposed conditions and that cruelty adds a separate injury to that captivity. The rebuke shifts attention from Jasper’s imagined bond with Bella to the dolphins’ material vulnerability: whatever meanings humans assign them, they remain animals dependent on people who control their environment.

Later, Jasper explains to Hazel that a brain modification allows him to experience sex with a human as a simulated encounter with a dolphin. He says the attraction is directed toward dolphins and that, with his eyes closed, the simulation feels complete; physically present with a woman, his attention can move elsewhere. The distinction is important for the dolphins as well as for Jasper. The simulation gives him an intensely personal sense of contact, but it does not establish a reciprocal relationship with any animal. When Hazel asks whether intimacy with her would still feel like sex with a dolphin, Jasper acknowledges that he may withdraw into that other experience rather than share an emotional connection with her. The dolphins thus occupy a paradoxical place in his life: they are the focus of a desire shaped by technology, while their own agency and participation remain beyond the simulation.

From Encounter to Disclosure

After the first encounter with a dolphin, Jasper tries to treat the change in his sexual response as a temporary disturbance rather than a lasting alteration. He tells himself not to panic and imagines his libido as a frightened creature that might return if given reassurance. The animal image turns inward: dolphins have become not only the focus of his attraction but also the frame through which he understands his own desire.

During a later medically supervised episode, dolphin imagery again shapes Jasper’s experience. When he becomes aware of the medical team around him, he tells Voda that the experience had felt like an encounter with a dolphin; she hears his quiet admission. The moment makes explicit how thoroughly the animals have entered his private perception, without making that perception evidence of contact or understanding from a dolphin.

Jasper later explains the brain modification to Hazel as part of a broader effort to stop concealing the truth about himself. He distinguishes physical intimacy with a human from the animal-centered experience produced by the modification, acknowledging that his attention may move elsewhere. The disclosure gives Hazel information with which to choose how to respond, and their subsequent intimacy is framed around her decision not to perform for him. Dolphins remain absent as participants in that exchange, even as the imagined experience associated with them shapes its terms.