51 pages • 1-hour read
One Last Rainy Day: The Legacy of a Prince
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, sexual content, substance abuse, cursing, graphic violence, addiction, illness, and death.
Storms
Storms are often associated with passion or depicted as something to be afraid of. Despite these violent and tumultuous associations, through Dom’s association of storms with his mother and Cecelia, they become a motif that demonstrates The Healing Nature of Emotional Vulnerability. He has a flashback to the day he asked his mother if he and Tobias would always be brothers, and she said that they would. There was a storm outside, and Tobias told Dom that thunder was the sound of giants. Dom ran to his mother, and she reassured him, saying, “It’s just a storm, Dominic […]. Nothing to be afraid of” (117). She explained that there were no giants, that it was only thunder, and she hugged and kissed his fears away. Given his treatment by Delphine after his parents’ deaths and his attitude toward women, his mother was likely the last person with whom Dom felt capable of emotional vulnerability. During life’s storms, the figurative and the literal, she supported him, and she told him he’d always have Tobias’s support as well.
As an adult, Dom comes to associate storms with Cecelia, because she spends rainy days with him. Being with her brings him peace; in fact, he seems capable of relaxing only when he’s with her. Their relationship begins to heal him as he grows to love her and experiences what it is like to be loved for all the parts of himself, even the ones he’s ashamed of or hates. The novel is titled One Last Rainy Day, as though this is the only thing in the world Dom wants after he chooses Tobias and the club over Cecelia; for Dom, the rain represents emotional safety and warmth, and this is why it seems healing.
The Divided Landscape
Dom tells Cecelia what it was like to be on a plane, as she’s never been on one. He describes how, after the initial adrenaline rush, he noticed the “landscape, only to see it’s littered with lines that act as borders” (252), and he describes “how unnatural” it looks divided up like that. He compares this sight to the way people in power divide the less powerful from one another because this separation keeps them compliant. Dom says, “Looking down from above is seeing what many don’t want us to see. Those continually laying down the lines—or controlling the people that do—want to keep us blind. Oblivious to the system that continually sets so many of us up for failure” (253). For this reason, the divided landscape Dom describes seeing from the airplane is a motif that illustrates The Fantasy of the American Dream.
Dom imagines that landscape as a symbol of the big picture of America, so to speak. Most people can’t see the way land is apportioned because they don’t ever get that bird’s eye view of it; this is mirrored in the way most people can’t see how power is distributed, controlled, and hoarded by those who have it because they never get to see the big picture. They only get to see their own small bit of the “landscape,” and this ignorance makes it easy for those who own the landscape to control them, by giving them access to only a very small piece of it.
Birds
Dom’s description of the “big picture” of the landscape, as can only be seen from above, also highlights the use of birds as a symbol of freedom. From an airplane, which flies overhead like a bird, Dom gets a clear view of things he cannot normally see. This view inspires his realization about and understanding of the problems with the American economy, American materialism, and even the so-called American Dream. When Dom accesses this bird’s-eye-view, the freedom allows him to develop a perspective he would otherwise lack.
In addition, the group Dom and Tobias lead refer to themselves as the “birds” and, sometimes, as “ravens.” Birds often symbolize freedom because of their ability to fly, and the men in the club do possess a level of freedom granted them, in part, because Dom and Tobias have the money and resources to protect them when they do things that are illegal. The choice of name suggests how difficult it is to “confine” or cage them. For example, Dom knows how and has the resources to keep the police from catching him when he kills the fly. Loyalty is also hugely important among this group, which makes sense because many birds are highly social animals that live in flocks for safety and to access food. Choosing “birds” as their symbol, moreover, hearkens back to the legend of Robin Hood, which is appropriate given the club’s purpose: taking from the rich to help the poor. Thus, birds symbolize freedom in many ways.
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