“My will”

“My will” is the disquieting answer Angel hears when she pleads for direction under Duke’s coercion. Its meaning is not spelled out; instead, the phrase marks a turn from helpless panic to an unexplained composure, and begins a scene in which Angel confronts the men assembled to consume her rather than simply disappearing into the role Duke has arranged.

The phrase in context

Duke has confined Angel upstairs under guard and is preparing to exhibit her before the men packed into the casino. He has stirred their anticipation with a show and announces that she will serve them for a week, making the threat both public and commercial. As the moment approaches, Angel prays desperately for God to kill her, then asks what he wants her to do. The answer is only “My will.”

The phrase supplies no instruction Angel can readily interpret: despair follows, because she does not know what that will is. Yet just as the guard signals that she must go onstage, her internal shaking stops. She cannot explain the calm, but it enables her to meet the guard’s control with a demand that he release her arm; startled, he does so, and she walks out.

From spectacle to encounter

Duke has planned the stage as a place where the crowd can look at Angel, imagine what it wants to do to her, and pay to make those imaginings real. Angel initially faces the noise as a threat and wants to hide or die. Then she hears an inward command to look at the men and, under the name Sarah, to see into their eyes. She recognizes their hollow disillusionment and broken dreams, a recognition that alters how she addresses the room.

When the crowd calls for a song, Angel does not follow the bawdy tune the piano player begins. She sings a song from long ago, recalling the music she once shared at a well with Michael and Miriam. The song falters when she reaches words about belief, and the casino falls silent. A gray-haired man near the bar takes up the missing words; Angel joins him as he walks through the crowd. The episode turns the stage from a prepared sexual spectacle into a moment of listening, though the phrase “My will” itself never specifies that song or explains the change.

Meaning and limits

The phrase’s force lies partly in its opacity. It does not remove Angel’s danger or tell her plainly what outcome to expect; its immediate effect is a calm that makes a next action possible. The surrounding scene gives that action a public dimension: Angel looks back at the audience, sings instead of complying with its demand, and draws the room into silence and response.

The novel also places this moment within a larger struggle over suffering and divine purpose. Michael has asked why God allowed the abuse Angel endured as a child, while Angel challenges the idea of mercy by recalling the cruelty directed at her and her mother. Later, when she asks whether God is playing a horrible joke on him, Michael says he already knows the answer to his own question: he must be strengthened. These exchanges do not settle the problem of suffering. They make “My will” resonant as a phrase of faith under pressure, while leaving its precise meaning—and the cost borne by Angel in the scene—unresolved.