La douleur

La douleur is the novel’s recurring association between physical sensation and emotional survival. It does not carry one meaning: Shelby Anderson Barnum turns pain against herself when overwhelmed, while Jungkook Jeon seeks it through physical exertion and describes some of it as pleasurable. The contrast makes pain a bodily language for distress and attempted control, but not a reliable path out of either character’s suffering.

Pain as bodily self-regulation

When Shelby is alone in her room, she handles a razor and considers what it will feel like against her skin. She cuts the inner part of her thighs, watching blood stain the blade; the familiar sensation brings a warmth she cannot easily explain. Guilt, fear, and suffering converge, rather than resolving into a single emotion. She continues until she loses count of the marks, then touches her injured skin and breaks down in tears. The episode connects self-harm to a desperate effort to manage overwhelming feelings, while also deepening her self-hatred and hopelessness.

Shelby later acknowledges that she continues to use a razor when she is doing badly or feels emotionally overwhelmed. She calls the behavior something she needs, then struggles to say more; the narrative clarifies that it is not a vital need but an unhealthy form of comfort. Her admission gives the private act a place in conversation and treatment, without suggesting that acknowledging it makes the compulsion disappear.

Jungkook’s response to pain takes a different, outward form. On September 25, he repeatedly strikes a punching bag without gloves or bandages, using the blows to release the anger accumulated during the day. His fingers redden toward bleeding, but he treats that pain as insignificant beside his rage. He shouts until his left wrist cracks, then collapses onto the floor, breathing rapidly. Namjoon enters and finds him with bloody fists. The scene makes the cost of Jungkook’s physical outlet visible: the blows discharge anger, yet leave him injured and provoke immediate concern from his friend.

Pleasure, violence, and the body

For Jungkook, pain is not only an outlet for anger; at times it is also a sensation he actively welcomes. When Shelby asks whether something hurt, he answers that it did, but that the pain was pleasant. Her response distinguishes his experience from her own familiarity with painful sensation: the same word covers sharply different relationships to the body. The distinction matters because the novel does not treat physical pain as inherently relieving or meaningful. Its significance depends on what produces it and what the character is trying to do with it.

That attraction appears again at a Los Angeles tattoo shop, where Jungkook has both nipples pierced. As the piercer disinfects his skin and works on each side, he feels the small pain as intensely pleasurable and thinks he will never tire of it. The scene places pain inside a chosen, controlled encounter, unlike the uncontrolled rage behind his bare-knuckled assault on the punching bag. Yet the two episodes share an investment in bodily sensation: one turns attention toward a deliberately chosen modification, the other converts anger into blows until injury forces Jungkook to stop.

The contrast does not make the chosen pain uncomplicated. Jungkook’s body is also marked by the violence he carries: after a fight at Ares Garden, Shelby sees blood on his knuckles as he goes to wash, then notices the tattoos across his hands and skin. Love and Hate appear across his fingers, while Japanese oni and roses bring beauty and danger together on his body. Shelby cannot yet understand the words’ meanings, but she registers their visual opposition. Pain, injury, and ornament consequently coexist in the same body, without the narrative collapsing them into one explanation.

Pain, disclosure, and the possibility of change

Pain also reaches backward into Jungkook Jeon’s childhood. When he tries to protect his mother from his father, a glass is thrown across the room; a shard cuts Jungkook’s face, and his father grabs him by the shirt and slaps him repeatedly. Fear and rage become tangled in the child’s body. The scene gives later physical aggression a history without presenting it as inevitable: pain has been bound to helplessness and violence long before Jungkook begins choosing the ring or the punching bag as outlets.

For Shelby Anderson Barnum, the private bodily response is accompanied by difficulty entering relationships and speaking about what happened to her. A psychologist recognizes that an event has made it hard for Shelby to open up, but accepts that she is not ready to talk and assures her that what she says will remain confidential. Later, Shelby admits that when emotion overwhelms her, she reaches for a razor and experiences the act as unhealthy comfort. In speaking to a friend, she also names self-harm, disordered eating, and cannabis use among the consequences of her trauma. The disclosures make suffering discussable, but they do not frame confession as an instant cure.

The movement from pain toward trust is expressed through small acts of witnessing. After Shelby tells Jungkook about her sexual assault, he takes her hands and tells her that he believes her. His response is significant against the silence and self-protection surrounding her experience: for a moment, physical contact does not injure or demand anything, but accompanies recognition. Their shared sense of carrying persistent inner demons gives the exchange a mutual dimension, while neither character’s pain is treated as interchangeable with the other’s.

That progress remains vulnerable to relapse. After learning that Ares Garden has reopened, Jungkook describes being swept into a trance by the pull of the old vice and returning to the ring; seeing Shelby’s tear-reddened eyes makes him regret the decision. The episode distinguishes immediate physical relief from lasting change: the ring can feel good and still reopen harm in their relationship. By the novel’s close, their movement forward is described as something achieved both separately and together, with their demons left behind through a difficult process rather than a single decisive release. Pain therefore remains part of the history they carry, but no longer defines the only way they can respond to it.

From private pain to public accountability

Pain also extends beyond the body into the harm inflicted on others and the demand that it be acknowledged. When Jungkook confronts Robert Jefferson, he rejects the claim that Robert has done nothing and invokes both Shelby and the other young women Robert has traumatized. Jungkook frames Robert’s imprisonment as a source of relief for those women, shifting attention from the perpetrator’s denial to the people who must live with the consequences of his actions.

That confrontation does not suggest that punishment can undo what happened. Instead, it gives pain a public dimension: what Shelby has carried privately is recognized as part of a wider pattern of injury, and the prospect of accountability matters because the harm is no longer treated as invisible. Set against the characters’ attempts to regulate distress through cutting, fighting, or returning to the ring, this demand marks a different response—not the disappearance of pain, but the refusal to leave its causes unspoken or without consequence.