Determinism and causality

Determinism and causality shape the novel’s debate over whether lives unfold according to a plan, through impersonal chains of cause and effect, or by chance to which people later assign meaning. Natasha Kingsley rejects supernatural destiny in favor of causes and consequences; Daniel Jae Ho Bae, caught between parental expectations and his own inclinations, occupies a less certain position. The distinction matters because their ideas of fate are also ideas about responsibility: whether a future is handed down, chosen, or made meaningful after the fact.

Fate, Chance, and the Stories People Tell

The narration sets Natasha’s view against the familiar belief that events happen for a reason. That belief offers comfort in the face of tragedy: if there is a plan, painful events may seem inevitable rather than preventable. The older mythic image of the Fates makes this belief vivid, imagining three sisters determining a newborn’s future, including the time and manner of death. Although the sisters have largely faded from modern consciousness, the underlying faith in Fate persists.

Against that account, Daniel’s reflection treats many apparent signs as coincidences that people turn into stories. A missing favorite pastry can seem like a message from the universe, just as missing a train can prompt an imagined disaster that the missed train supposedly spared someone from. But the cafeteria may simply have another box in the back, a friend may share cake, and another train eventually arrives; no disaster need have been waiting underground. The examples expose how easily an event acquires a reassuring or ominous explanation without evidence that it was arranged for that purpose.

The distinction is not between events having causes and events being meaningless. Rather, the novel separates ordinary consequences from a cosmic intention behind them. People make choices and encounter outcomes, but their later explanations do not prove that the universe arranged those outcomes in advance. Meaning can be constructed after an event without being the event’s original cause.

Natasha’s Causal Model

Natasha describes her outlook as determinism: one action leads to another, and actions determine what follows. Her rejection of destiny is explicit in her account of choosing a career. She researched expanding fields in the sciences through her school library’s career section and decided to become a data scientist; the work suits her personality, but she does not regard the profession as something fate selected for her. Research and choice, rather than a calling imposed from beyond herself, explain how she arrived there.

This account gives causality a practical, human scale. The chain is made from decisions and their consequences, not from a divine plan. It also locates Natasha’s agency in the process of making a choice: a career can be selected in response to information and personal fit, rather than accepted as a predetermined identity. The narration notes a resemblance between this outlook and Daniel’s father, linking Natasha’s way of thinking to a perspective already present in Daniel’s family without collapsing their circumstances into one another.

Daniel Between Expectation and Choice

Daniel’s uncertainty about fate is bound up with the future his family has laid out for him. At the time of his Yale University admissions interview, he has refused to apply to Harvard University, partly because he cannot bear the prospect of being Charlie Bae’s younger brother at another school and partly because Charlie’s suspension might affect his own chances. The decision is a concrete choice, but it takes shape inside family comparison and anxiety about admission.

The pressure extends beyond college. Daniel’s mother expects him to take his studies seriously, while the household treats the brothers’ path toward becoming doctors as fixed. Daniel imagines that Charlie may have failed because he disliked his classes, did not want to become a doctor, did not know what he wanted, or simply changed. Yet in the family, change itself seems impermissible: they are on a track to medicine, with no exit. The tension is between a causal account of life, in which people can change and their actions produce consequences, and a family script that treats the future as already settled.

Daniel explains that his parents are first-generation Korean immigrants who moved to the United States for a better life and work constantly so their sons can attain the American Dream. In his family’s version of that dream, college and a secure profession are necessary; becoming a starving artist is not included. He believes that refusing the prescribed course could mean losing financial support for college altogether. The pressure therefore operates not only as an expectation but as a material condition shaping which choices seem available.

Practicality, Agency, and the Ending

Natasha’s career decision provides a contrast to Daniel’s sense that he is going to Yale and will become a doctor because that is what his family requires. Her example shows that practicality need not mean submission to destiny: she researched her options and chose a path that suited her. Daniel, by contrast, experiences the practical route as a demand backed by the threat of being cut off, making it harder to separate his own preference from the consequences imposed by his family.

Later, Natasha tells Daniel that he should not be a doctor, and when he invokes doing the practical thing, she answers that practicality is overrated. The exchange brings the philosophical question into their relationship and back to Daniel’s central conflict. A future may be shaped by prior actions and real constraints without being a fate that must be obeyed. The novel leaves the force of causality intact while challenging the assumption that inherited expectations, coincidences, or retrospective explanations amount to destiny.