I Cheerfully Refuse

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-10

Chapters 11-19

Chapters 20-27

Chapters 28-37

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

Processing Grief to Heal

Content Warning: This guide includes moments of and references to suicide, addiction, abuse, and domestic violence.

In the crumbling world of I Cheerfully Refuse, characters constantly face and overcome immense grief. It follows them, just like the storms of Lake Superior, and through personal journeys and supportive relationships, characters like Rainy confront the burden of their losses. Rainy in particular confronts grief in the novel, trying to understand and process the loss of his wife, Lark. Her sudden murder shakes him to his core and makes his flight from Werryck a journey of not only survival but self-discovery. As Rainy tries to make it to the Slate Islands, hoping to meet Lark’s spirit there, he can’t escape her presence: “I saw Lark for one long moment in the island’s craggy sheer. What I mean is her face took shape in the ancient stone as I drifted slowly past. Her eyes were shadows, her lips ridges softened by distance, her hair a sweep of climbing firs” (124-25). The grief that haunts Rainy is always present. He constantly thinks of Lark and often finds her in his dreams and memories. Her influence on his life is so strong that he even sees her in the nature around him. Lark is embedded into every aspect of Rainy’s life, and he feels her loss in every place and every moment.

As Rainy travels around Lake Superior, either fleeing from Werryck and other antagonists or seeking a safe home for Sol, he attempts to process his grief over losing Lark. In Rainy’s mind, the best way to overcome his pain is to once again meet Lark. He believes that if he goes to the Slate Islands, she’ll appear there, just as she once believed they met the spirit of Molly Thorn there. This hope makes it difficult for Rainy to fully move on from Lark’s death and accept that he has a future without her. Only when he finally reaches the Slate Islands and feels her presence can he look ahead: “Slowly I became conscious of a slight warm weight against my back, a pressure like a palm between my shoulder blades. I wanted it to stay but didn’t try to keep it. The warmth remained as dawn filtered through the hatches” (327). When Rainy feels Lark lying beside him, placing her palm as she always did on his back, Rainy can finally accept that he has a life to live after Lark. This moment is a turning point, in which Rainy heads back to Jolie to invest in a new community and family with Sol. In the end, he needs resolution from Lark, not revenge against her killers, to heal.

Navigating Dystopia

I Cheerfully Refuse is a speculative novel that unfolds in a dystopian world. The dystopian aspects of Rainy’s world influence how the characters operate and make decisions. For Rainy and many others, like Kellan, life is dominated by the fact that wealth disparity is out of control and the majority of society now lives well beneath the ruling class. This fosters a sense of desperation and apocalypse as the rich hoard both basic necessities and modern needs:

[H]e gently informed me astronaut was the prevailing idiom for the sixteen or so families who ran coastal economies and owned mineral rights and satellite clusters and new factories and prisons and most clean water and such shipping as remained (17).

The astronauts are an incredibly small, incredibly wealthy group that owns and manipulates the economy for their own interests. This has a trickle-down effect for the rest of the country since clean water is scarce and public works and resources are virtually nonexistent. In this dystopia, the rich prey on the weak and desperate, a population of their own making. By hoarding resources and wealth, these astronauts control the starved and underserved masses, creating a dangerous and cutthroat society that largely ignores societal norms and laws.

While the novel explores this dystopia predominantly through societal changes and tensions between the ultra-rich and the poor, it also examines a decaying environment. Throughout the novel, references to how the world’s changing climate impacts society dominate the plot and create an atmosphere of foreboding and peril. The most explicit example of this is how with rising temperatures, bodies confined to the depths of Lake Superior for years begin to rise. Society must adapt to this new change, and new laws dictate that regular citizens dispose of these bodies by re-sinking them. Even whole communities, like Jolie, adapt to this new horror: “Jolie began, every few weeks at first but now every couple of days, to receive those who surfaced, the officers and mates, the ordinary seamen, the navigators […] and all those who rose and went unclaimed” (325). The town has a graveyard for unclaimed floaters, and the frequency of its use is shocking. By creating a dystopia through environmental and societal changes, I Cheerfully Refuse creates additional peril and intrigue for Rainy on this journey: He must navigate not only his enemies and the lake but also an out-of-control and unpredictable world.

The Influence of Music on the Human Experience

As the protagonist, Rainy draws many comparisons to Orpheus, a famed musician of Greek mythology. Rainy is a bass guitarist, and music is a central aspect of his life. For Rainy, music is a refuge as well as a means by which he can help others. Rainy witnesses firsthand through his guitar playing the impact that music can have on others. When he plays, he feels as though he can influence a crowd, agitate others, or even bring peace to those in pain.

Rainy’s relationship with Labrino is in many ways founded on Rainy’s ability to soothe the conflicted Labrino: “If I played well then Labrino saw hillsides, moving water, his wife Eva before she got sick of him. There in the kitchen he relaxed into himself, eyes closed, mouth slightly open, until I feared he might crumple and fall to the floor” (4). Rainy can take Labrino’s pain and weaken it, allowing him to relax and briefly forget all that troubles him. Like Orpheus, Rainy’s music seems to have a magical quality. He finds ways to connect with his listeners and uses notes and progressions to influence their thoughts and emotions. He does this to lull Sol to sleep, stir up a crowd to escape Werryck, and even calm himself.

Rainy doesn’t merely see music as a way to manipulate others’ emotional states, however, but also as a uniting and hopeful force. On the medicine ship, he witnesses the atrocities of the 12 squelettes and struggles to accept Werryck’s cruelty. He can sense the pain in others and the night that the 12 squelettes are trapped out in the storm, but he plays to bring peace and hope to all, not just himself: “Nothing I could do but play, to coax what I could for as long as I could. For the twelve on the raft. For Lark and Sol. For those sleeping in the Shambles and those […] fearfully awake, touching the pipes […] to catch the notes” (296). Rainy knows that some can hear him when he plays in his cell and hopes that his playing during this trying time brings them some peace. His insistence on playing for the 12 squelettes, for Lark, and for Sol, shows that he sees his music and his playing in this moment as a uniting force of resistance against Werryck. He takes the pain inflicted upon all these people and tries to remedy it through music. In this sense, music becomes a means by which he helps build community and strengthen bonds.