The Optimists

Richard Fords The Optimists is a narrative based on the retelling of a pivotal event in the storys
protagonists life. The protagonist is the narrator and he retells a story about his youth as an adult. Id
like to focus on three techniques presented in the story that all add up to equal one major technique
that is explored throughout: Ford uses repetition, the title of the story, and Calvinos quickness to
emphasize the character reversal of each of the protagonists family members in The Optimists.
Despite there being three different methods under observation, I will be weaving all three of them
together throughout this essay, because in reality they all do the same thing, but just have different
names. The focus will be how the mother, father, and protagonist begin the story with how they end.
Ford begins with introducing the narrator as an adult and prefacing the story with, All of this
that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were
divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and
school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back (279). In this excerpt we
are presented with a mode of foreshadowing to let the reader know what they are getting into. It is at
this juncture where I would like to introduce Calvinos principle of quickness in fiction. Throughout
the story, Ford only tells explosive events of progression, which come to define the storys protagonist,
but whats important is what he leaves out. He doesnt mention what happens when the protagonist
goes to the Army, or any events in between one dreadful evening and the resurgence of the mother into
the protagonists adult life at the end of the story. All events in-between, though, arent explored or
mentioned. The focus of the author is to bounce in-between the specific night and the protagonists
adult presence as a narrator. This bouncing back and forth between two specific times gives the story
Calvinos sense of quickness, because time becomes complicated and, at times, nonexistent in the
fiction. It is almost as if time has no sense of place, because the story is a retelling, and the story isnt
finished yet. Calvino describes the legend of Charlemagne and a magical ring in his chapter on
quickness, but in Fords story it is the presence of the narration, which acts as an object similar to the
magical ring that captivates the reader and manipulates them as such. The narration can take the reader
to any time and any place, and hold the complete power of the story. What becomes even more
complicated is whether or not the reader can trust this narrator?
The next technique combines the other two aforementioned in this essay: the title and
repetition. The title The Optimists alludes to the narrators family being optimistic before the night
described in the text, and not so much thereafter. There are several instances where optimism and
navet become blatantly obvious for an effect of repetition, as well as making the title a motif
throughout. One example of this repetition of optimistic statements is when the family bails the father
out from prison after he just killed a man with a single punch in front of them. On the car ride home
the father says, I want us to be happy here now, my father said. I want us to enjoy life. I dont hold
anything against anybody. Do you believe that? I believe that, I said (286). Here we saw how
optimistic the narrator once was, and we even see how fool-heartedly optimistic the father is. And
what eventually happens is that the father goes to jail, becomes divorced, and is never heard from
again; the son disappears from his family and goes into the Army; and the mother becomes a divorcee
and clings onto other men for support. Every character has a quote or moment in the story that is naive
and unfounded, and then every character ends up relatively hopeless, which then brings us back to the
title: These people truly were Optimists. They were a family of previously optimistic people, who
essentially have their worldview shattered by one night of harsh reality, and Ford shows this by using
three techniques that highlight whats really going on in this retelling
Richard Fords Optimists is about a middle-aged man reflecting on the time when, as a young man,
he witnessed his father kill another man with a single blow to the chest, as well as the whirlwind of
changes that followed in his familys life soon thereafter. Its important to note that although Frank, the
narrator, is said to be middle-aged at the time hes recounting this to the reader, the majority of the
piece takes place in the perspective of his younger self at age fifteen. The beauty of Fords writing is
how, despite the significance of telling the reader of the ages at certain points in his life, Frank is
consistently placated by his parents, but more specifically by his mother. The reader is introduced to
Frank knowing that he is fifteen in 1959, but we somehow cant help but feel the infantilization to the
point where Frank seems to be a young child rather than a teenager. In one such instance, Frank recalls
how he would lie in bed at night while his mother and her friends played cards until Franks father
came home after work around midnight:
And in a while the door to my room would open and the light would fall inside, and my mother would
set a chair back in. I could see her silhouette. She would always say, Go back to sleep, Frank. And
then the door would shut again, and I would almost always go to sleep in a minute.
Ford employs exclusion as a way of cementing the readers projection of Frank as a young child. For
instance, Frank is never invited to play cards with the adults, and on the night the story centers on, he
is in the kitchen, eating a sandwich alone at the table, and [his] mother [is] in the living room playing
cards with Penny and Boyd Mitchell. His father comes home early from work, having witnessed a
man get caught and die under a train on the railroad tracks. Franks mother turned and looked for
[him], and [he] knew she was thinking that this was something [he] might not need to see. But she
didnt say anything. Boyd, who worked for Red Cross, drunkenly confronts Franks father, claiming
he could have saved the mans life if hed tried to. This sets Franks father off, and after additional
barbs from Boyd, the two men square off, resulting in the first throw being the last, with Franks father
almost instantly killing Boyd with a single blow to the chest. Ford takes this opportunity, despite how
caught up the reader gets in the scene, to remind us that Frank has been in the kitchen the entire time
and that even as readers, we have sidestepped Frank in his own story, and for that reason [he] walked
out into the room where [his] father and mother were[He] looked down at Boyd Mitchell, at his
face. [He] wanted to see what had happened to [Boyd].
When Frank is questioned by the police, even his response is wrought with navet:
I said Boyd Mitchell had cursed at my father for some reason I didnt know, then had stood up and
tried to hit him, and that my father had pushed Boyd, and that was all. [The policeman] asked me if
my father was a violent man, and I said no [] He asked me if my mother and father ever fought, and
I said no. He asked me if I loved my mother and father, and I said I did. And then that was all.
After Frank and his mother get his father out of jail, Frank says he did not understand why the police
would put anyone in jail because he had killed a man and in two hours let him out again.
Later that night, Franks mother comes into his room and asks him if he thinks his house is a terrible
house now, as if she is dealing with a toddler.
Over the years, Frank loses contact with both of his parents, and ends up running into his mother at a
grocery store when he is in his forties. He approaches her, and soon their conversation turns to the
night Franks father killed Boyd Mitchell. Ford brilliantly closes the piece by showing the readers that
the way Frank interacts with his mother, even after their long estrangement, is still that of a child, even
though he is a middle-aged man: And she bent down and kissed my cheek through the open window
and touched my face with both her hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before
she turned away, finally, and left me there alone.