Optimism as a belief in survival

Optimism in the novel is not simple cheerfulness but a practiced conviction that survival remains possible, even when the evidence turns against it. First voiced as political advice and later repeated inside a wrecked, flooding car, the idea changes from a rule for remaining in public life into Kelly Kelleher’s urgent method of resisting death. Its power lies in the gap between what she cannot control and what she can still choose to do.

Political Credo and Inheritance

Kelly’s former employer, Carl Spader, gives optimism a distinctly political formulation: a person in politics must remain optimistic. The saying belongs to a remembered world of Democratic Party campaigning and to nostalgia for the 1960s, when political life could still be associated with purpose, authority, hope, and youth. Kelly was not yet four when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968 and remembers nothing of the tragedy itself; what she inherits is not a personal memory of that loss but a professional maxim shaped by its aftermath.

The maxim’s reversals are stark. If a person is no longer optimistic, Spader’s saying continues, that person is no longer in politics; the next version darkens the thought further, equating the loss of optimism with being dead. The progression makes optimism more than a disposition: it becomes a condition of participation and, finally, a figure for life itself. In the political setting, it urges persistence through disappointment. The same formula later returns under circumstances where death is literal rather than rhetorical.

A Refrain Underwater

After the car crashes into the water, Kelly is trapped in its distorted interior, injured and unable to see clearly. The black water rises around her, while her right foot becomes numb and unresponsive and her leg remains caught in twisted metal. In that physical extremity, optimism is no longer a slogan about political work. It is a refusal to let fear dictate her next thought or action. She tells herself not to dwell on what she cannot establish about her foot, and the refrain that she is an optimist interrupts that speculation.

The belief does not make the danger unreal. Kelly understands the water as filthy, thick with the smell and taste of sewage, gasoline, and oil; she has vomited, and the rising water threatens to fill her lungs. Her insistence on optimism works instead by narrowing attention from catastrophe to immediate possibility. She concentrates on what she can do, holding on to the thought that if she keeps her head above the water, she can continue to act. The refrain turns a broad claim about the future into a task measured in moments.

Her resolve is tied to a prior decision about life. After her relationship with G-----, Kelly vowed never to take her own life because all life is precious. Now, although her circumstances are imposed on her rather than chosen, that commitment gives her a reason to resist surrender. The narration describes survival as a matter of strength, will, and concentration: optimism is not a guarantee that she will be rescued, but a way of maintaining enough purpose to keep trying.

The Limits of Optimism

The refrain also registers what Kelly cannot overcome by belief alone. She recalls hesitating to say that they were lost and failing to insist that the car turn around because she did not want to offend the man beside her. In the wreck, she interprets that hesitation as part of the path to danger. Her private rule that it is better not to offend even a nice man sits uneasily beside the stronger survival rule she now needs: acknowledge the danger and act.

That tension connects optimism to Kelly’s experience of desire and touch. On the beach, the Senator grips her shoulders while they hike through the dunes, and she feels both eager and apprehensive, thinking that something is happening that cannot be stopped. During their kisses, she recognizes the desire as his rather than her own, and anxiety follows the familiar assumption that if she has made a man want her, she cannot refuse him. Even a friendly-seeming gesture can carry pain: the Senator squeezes her hand harder than necessary, while Kelly remembers that G----- sometimes hurt her unconsciously. Against this history, optimism can preserve her capacity to trust and respond, but it does not by itself protect her from unequal power or from the pressure to accommodate male desire.

Will, Action, and Meaning

Kelly’s optimism takes its clearest practical form when she bargains with the imagined rescue team. She is willing to trade her right leg, or both legs, and promises to sign a release and not sue if amputation is necessary. She even thinks that she could explain matters to her father, Artie Kelleher, whom her family teases as litigious, and take responsibility herself. These are not assurances that rescue will come. They are desperate, specific offers through which Kelly tries to make continued life imaginable, even at the cost of lasting bodily harm.

The novel’s use of the refrain holds together its political and personal meanings without making them identical. In Spader’s formulation, optimism keeps a person in politics; in the submerged car, it keeps Kelly oriented toward the next act of survival. Yet the story also marks the cost of treating optimism as an obligation: Kelly has already been reluctant to contradict the Senator, and now she has to confront danger that deference did not prevent. The belief matters not because it promises a happy outcome, but because it preserves her will to choose and act while the outcome remains uncertain.