Alice

Alice is the main character of the novel. Her character first appears in a series of narrative asides in the novel’s opening chapter, “The Underground Pool.” Alice is one of the longtime members of the pool community. She is therefore a fixture in the underground pool realm. Because she is elderly and “now in the early stages of dementia,” everyone in the pool community knows to be kind to and gentle with her (3). Alice visits the pool not only because it allows her to leave her life above ground, but because swimming in the pool grants her a sense of clarity she does not feel elsewhere. The narrator in “The Underground Pool” says that “the moment she slips into the water she knows what to do” (4). Because this reference to Alice’s experience in the water appears amidst the narrator’s descriptions of other swimmers’ experiences, the...