Lurie realizes he was totally helpless to physically protect his daughter from sexual molestation. As a man and a father, he could not save Lucy from unwanted sexual danger, seemingly confirming what he sees as her apparent distrust and dislike of men. At first, Lurie feels like he is no longer a man. As an object of romantic fascination, he is growing older in the eyes of women, and his female students rejected him -- one of the reasons he 'pounced' upon his seemingly last chance at love. Lurie's academic career was long failing, but Lucy's rape mean that now he is completely reduced, in his eyes, to an utterly useless being, a man with no power in his body, heart, and even his mind -- a state of inner and outer alienation and disgrace from any kind of social identity.

Ironically, Lurie's specialty is 19th Century Romantic literature, a literature that attempted to celebrate the human capacity for feeling and championed social outsiders. However, the university Lurie taught at, which began as a proper school of learning, was demoted to a technical school by the time he found his desired student. Rather than teach the real words and real thoughts of great thinkers Lurie had to mouth the words enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, that human beings, with so-called basic training, were easily capable of communicating in society about their feelings and intentions. Lurie could not...

The book begins by Lurie resolving to attempt to completely segment sexuality from his human interrelations with people. However, he begins to feel affection for one of the prostitutes he has implicated in his solution, an act that foreshadows his involvement with his student and his subsequent falling from his position and status in South African society.
His fall from grace through teaching also highlights the inability for Lurie, despite his intellect, to coldly and clinically segment feeling from thought, and sexual action from romantic feeling.

Only after being left with nothing, not even the comforts of paternalistic fatherhood and the masculine privilege it entails does David truly understand his abased status and accept his need to learn from others. After the attack, David takes his role at the shelter seriously, finally establishes a meaningful relationship with his daughter, a home, and melds his physical labors of the body with a meaningful attempt at creating a place of love for outcasts such as Lucy and her dogs.