Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind.
-- Narrator (The Underground Pool)

Importance: Throughout "The Underground Pool," the first person plural narrator endeavors to explain the symbolic significance of the underground pool to its many frequent swimmers. Although each individual swimmer has a distinct set of reasons for coming to the pool, all of the swimmers use the pool as a way to escape their otherwise unhappy or entrapping lives above ground. In this moment, the narrator asserts that the pool disappears the swimmers' aboveground troubles and worries. Over the course of the pages that follow, the reader learns about the ways that the pool endeavors to erase the absorb the individual swimmers' identities into the collective in order to grant them an illusive sense of escape and belonging. This moment introduces the complicated nature of such purportedly liberating societal structures, and their effects on the individual consciousness...