Bunny’s sexual appetite

Bunny’s sexual appetite is both a driving habit and a fragile measure of how he understands himself. He repeatedly imagines sexual pursuit as evidence of his personal power, but the story places that confidence beside grief, loneliness, and moments when his customary assurance falters. The appetite gives him a means of turning away from distress; it does not resolve the distress, and its hold over him becomes a measure of the distance between the man he imagines himself to be and the life he has to face.

Identity and Performance

At the Grenville Hotel, the narrative introduces Bunny alone in his underwear, drinking brandy and trying to reassure Libby Munro over the phone. His attention moves between her fear and his own sexual imagination. The juxtaposition establishes a pattern: intimacy and vulnerability reach him, but his attention can divert toward appetite rather than remain with another person’s distress. His casual reassurance to Libby sits uneasily beside his private sense that he has made a grave mistake, a recognition that quickly passes.

Sexual confidence is also part of the identity Bunny performs. In the breakfast room, he watches a waitress walk away and imagines that she faces a life-defining choice: to continue on or turn back and enter the orbit of his supposed magnetism. This is Bunny’s projection, not evidence of the waitress’s interest. The scene makes the gap between his self-image and another person’s independent choice especially clear. His belief in his own power supplies a story in which women’s decisions confirm his allure before they have made any such decision.

Intimacy and Grief

Bunny’s remembered first night with Libby shows how his appetite intrudes even into a memory of emotional closeness. He recalls Libby crying in a hotel room in Eastbourne and apologizing for her emotions. As he listens to her later distress about her father and her fear of attacks on women, the memory turns his attention back toward his own physical gratification. The contrast links his sexual reflex not simply to pursuit, but to difficulty staying with fear and sorrow when they require care rather than performance.

After Libby’s suicide, Bunny’s encounter with River sharpens the distinction between sexual activity and emotional connection. River leaves while he feigns sleep, and he wonders whether the sense of disconnection he experienced with her will last. He considers whether Libby’s death has somehow spoiled his sexual confidence, even entertaining the idea that he might be finished as a seducer. His uncertainty exposes the appetite’s dependence on a self-image that can be shaken: what he once treats as a reliable source of mastery now seems vulnerable to grief and loss.

Confidence, Failure, and Control

Bunny’s thoughts about River do not lead to a settled understanding of his condition. Anxiety about his wife, his son, his ailing father, and another night in the council flat gathers around him, while questions about his sexual capacity remain part of the same unsettled mental field. He cannot make sense of his grief by explaining it as a sexual setback, yet that is one of the explanations he reaches for. The passage presents this as speculation, not as a supernatural fact or a diagnosis.

He eventually turns to a private sexual act involving River’s yellow underwear and then falls into deep sleep. The sequence gives the appetite a practical, immediate function: it offers a route from agitation toward temporary rest. It does not show that Bunny has solved the problems troubling him. Rather, the abrupt return to familiar self-gratification follows his inability to settle those questions through reflection. Appetite supplies an ending to the night, not an answer to the grief and obligations that have occupied his thoughts.

A contrasting moment comes when Bunny discards a gift from Poodle and experiences a sudden sense that he is in command of his life. He feels virtuous and privately declares control over his appetites. The confidence is striking partly because it differs from the repeated scenes in which desire dictates his attention. Its force is momentary, however: the passage presents a surge of feeling, not proof that his behavior has permanently changed. A family scene in the public gardens, where a father plays with his young son while the mother prepares a picnic, immediately complicates the moment. The ordinary picture of family life gives his newfound assurance an uncomfortable counterpoint.

Fatherhood and Inherited Masculinity

Bunny’s sexual self-conception belongs to a larger masculine performance that also includes salesmanship and a belief in command. He tries to draw Bunny Junior into the family business by presenting the choice between school and learning to sell as a test of what the boy will amount to. At this point, the boy’s immediate concern is his painful eyes and need for drops; Bunny’s insistence on the business reveals how readily his own priorities displace his son’s expressed need. His appetite is therefore part of a broader pattern in which forceful confidence can crowd out attention to other people.

That pattern has a paternal history. Bunny’s father claims to have tried to teach him the business and says he showed his son beautiful things, while condemning the work Bunny ultimately does selling toilet brushes. The older man’s account frames masculinity as something handed down through instruction and judgment. Bunny’s response to Poodle’s insult about his father—an immediate threat—also shows how strongly he reacts when that inheritance is mocked. The evidence does not establish a direct cause between his father’s teaching and Bunny’s sexual behavior; it does place his pursuit of mastery within a family world where men assess one another through toughness, work, and the ability to command.

Narrative Significance

The recurring appetite functions as a countermeasure to vulnerability, but also as an unreliable one. Bunny uses sexual fantasy and pursuit to restore the image of himself as potent and in control, while the narrative repeatedly sets that image against women’s independent circumstances, his own emotional disconnection, and the needs of Bunny Junior. In the waitress scene, his certainty invents consent where the evidence supplies only his fantasy. In his memories of Libby and his reflections after River leaves, the same self-absorption appears beside genuine fear and loss.

The pattern’s central contradiction is that appetite promises command while exposing Bunny’s dependence on affirmation and distraction. His claim that he controls his appetites briefly reverses the usual direction of power, but the surrounding narrative does not convert that declaration into a lasting resolution. Instead, sexual desire remains one thread in a wider crisis of grief, fatherhood, and inherited masculine expectation: a source of temporary relief and self-belief that cannot, by itself, repair his relationships or meet the demands they place on him.