Comparing John Cheever’s The Swimmer and The Five-Forty-Eight

Harry Crews's Body and John Cheever's "Five-Forty-Eight" offer characters whose lives lack control. Although Crews's Bateman is a perfecting, attractive, and popular body builder, his life does not satisfy him. However, from the outside Bateman appears happy and content. On the other hand, Cheever's Ms. Dent is skinny, shy, emotional, and disheveld. Her description reflects the unsteadiness and the insecurity in her life. Although Bateman's personality contrast with Ms. Dent's, they have a similar need for control. Bateman and Ms. Dent search for control in the form of love objects. Bateman finds Earline Turnipseed an obese, virginal, simple and complacent "redneck."

The structure of a novel enables it to embody, integrate and communicate its content by revealing its role in the creation and perception of it. A complex structure such as that of Robert Drewe’s work The Drowner, published in 1996, refers to the interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity1. Drewe’s novel is a multi-faceted epic love story presenting a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life and death force2. The main concerns of the novel include concerns about love, life, death and human frailty. These concerns are explored through the complex structure of the novel. That is, through its symbolic title, prologues, and division into sections. The

For this essay, I am going to be discussing the short story “Swimming” found on the New Yorker, and written by T. Cooper. I have chosen this story for many reasons, and among those reasons is the personal sadness I felt when I first read the story, almost as if the universe was placing a certain theme in my life, that only the main character could possibly understand. I am talking about running, the god given instinct felt by all men, inherent in the nature of fear, and brought out in all who feel sadness in its full intensity. Though in my short life I can not compare the sadness I have felt with that of losing a child at my own hand, but if I had been placed in that situation, if fate had tempted my soul with such a sequence of events, I would like to think I could find the strength to endure and the courage to not abandon all I had previously known. Yet I am able to reconcile the themes of grief, the mode of recovery, and the longing to escape such a terrible tale. I think in this piece, as I will discuss in later parts, the author was able to put into words a transformation we rarely get to observe in closeness, the kind of transformation that turns a kind man into a “just man” the kind of death that turns this world from a beautiful and happy place into a world that is closing in on our main character, that is forcing him to surface temporarily and gasp for air, much like he does when he finds peace in the water, wading breath after air, after sea. I firmly believe that

Drinking may not seem to be so bad at first, but the consequences come later in the journey. John Cheever begins this short story with an initial sign of casual drinking. Ned Merrill and his wife are accompanied by friends who all say they “drank too much last night” as if they were all drinking together (Cheever 726). Right from the beginning, Cheever gives readers the hint that characters from this story drink a lot. He makes it a part of the social norm, so it seems to be something done on the regular. Before Ned decides to begin a journey to swim the Lucinda River, he notices the weather. Cheever directs the focus to the fact that “it was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance”, marking the beginning of the storm (726). Looking into the West, a place of death and misfortune, are where fluffy and cotton-like clouds are on display. In literature, the West is often symbolic of death and dying since the sun sets over that horizon. A time where leaves and plants die, and the start of darkness. Those clouds may look peaceful, but they represent the beginning of a storm coming from the disastrous West.

John Cheever’s short story, “The Swimmer,” describes the epic journey of Neddy Merrill as he attempts to swim his way back home. Throughout the story, readers continually question reality and fantasy while wondering whether Merrill is really experiencing what Cheever portrays or if he is simply stuck in the past. Merrill goes from house to house as he freestyles across each swimming pool along the way. As the story draws to the end, Cheever points out that Merrill’s world is not what it seems and he has really lost everything he loved. An analysis of “The Swimmer” by John Cheever through the liberal humanist and Marxist lenses suggests that the story

“The Swimmer” is an allegory that is narrated in third person point of view as someone who is observing Neddy’s journey. This

In the short story, “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses precise literary devices to emphasize the true meaning behind what the average reader might first gather. Throughout this short story, Neddy’s journey is recorded through what he does and how the time changes. His actions of “jumping from pool to pool” show Neddy’s incapabilities of growing up and the falsehood that he lives in. John Cheever wants the readers to understand that Neddy’s life is only a downfall as the years go by, and that his outlook on life doesn’t change until he realizes all his actions have left him alone. To set the tone of the story, the author uses metaphors of different objects to show Neddy’s changes in life, change of diction to set a tone from excellence to weakness, and Neddy’s life paralleled through the imagery described in this short story.

In the short story “The Swimmer” by John Cheever, the main character Neddy, is at a friends’ house, but decides to take a new route home. Neddy wanted to swim home by going through numerous neighboring backyards. It was an 8 mile swim home for a man who never did anything for himself. All he ever did was inherit money. it is Neddy’s delusional arrogance and not his loss of wealth that leaves him lost and alone at the end of his journey. Neddy thinks arrogantly about his life and his friends as he plans his journey at the Weterhazy’s. Neddy seems delusional throughout the entire story traveling his journey to the public pool and the Hallorans. After losing his family and friends,

In the short story “ The Swimmer,” John Cheever expresses the idea that Neddy Merrill can lose everything if he denies reality. Cheever achieves this by employing various symbols during Merrill's cross county journey. The main symbols are the weather and seasons. Cheever uses the changing of seasons to distort the character’s sense of time and show the progression of Merrill’s life. In the beginning of the story the setting is described as a midsummer day and by the end of the story, Merrill is able to see the constellations of late autumn, meaning winter is near. The illusion of time allows the reader to understand the extent of Merrill’s state of denial, as his beliefs begin to contradict the reality around him. While Cheever uses the weather to describe how Merrill feels. When it is warm Merrill feels happy and youthful. However, when it becomes colder Merrill begins to feel weak and sad. To emphasize Merrill’s state of denial, Cheever employs the motif of alcohol in “The Swimmer;” the reader notices that when Merrill is presented with a reality that he deems unpleasant, he uses alcohol to enhance his state of denial. Through the critical lens of New Historicism, the reader can infer the author’s purpose for writing “The Swimmer” is to criticize the lifestyles of affluent people in the 1950s and early 1960s. Cheever focuses on the party lifestyle of affluent communities and how the use of alcohol allows them to deny the reality around their current misfortunes.

fact that this essay has been referenced in so many other critiques on “The Swimmer”,

Daniel James Brown manages to awe and inspire readers in his book The Boys in the Boat, which describes the hardships a row crew from Washington underwent to make it to the 1936 Olympics. The story of the nine rowers on the Washington crew teaches lessons about inner confidence, trust, dedication, and the hope that can be found during even the most difficult times. I learned while reading that being the underdog doesn’t mean you’re destined to fail. Readers see that despite the hardships and many disadvantages the Washington crew faced, their dedication allowed them to beat the odds and inspire an entire nation.

In The Swimmer a short story by John Cheever a man named Neddy Merrill decides to swim across every pool in the county naming his route the Lucinda River after his wife. As he goes on this journey some of his neighbors are nice, some show pity, and others show distaste for him. Throughout the story Cheever gives subtle hints that Neddy is disoriented as he doesn’t remember key details of things that have happened to his friends in the area. At the end of the story a disoriented Neddy reaches his home to find it empty, with his family gone. Cheever uses this short story to critique the way of life in the upper class suburbs of America that contributed to the social demise of Neddy Merrill

John Cheever and F. Scott Fitzgerald are both 20th century writers whose story’s thematically reflected the despair and the emptiness of life. In both story’s “The Swimmer” and “Babylon Revisited” the main characters undergo similar problems, although they are presented differently in each story. The subject matter of both stories, pertain to the ultimate downfall of a man. “The Swimmer”, conveys the story of a man who swims his way into reality. He at first is very ignorant to his situation; however with the passing of time he becomes cognizant to the idea that he has lost everything. In “Babylon Revisited” the key character is a “recovering alcoholic”, who return to his homeland in hope to get his daughter back. However, problems from

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the short story “The Swimmer” by Jon Cheever and it’s film adaptation. Overall, the film and the short story use different dialogue, different characterization, and different visual effects and imagery to provide the reader and the viewer with the allegory of Ned Merrill’s life. While both works focus on the fanciful nature of moving across an entire neighborhood using swimming pools, there are more differences between the film and short story than similarities. Firstly, I will begin by describing the usage of visual effects in the film and imagery in the short story. Secondly, I will describe the differences in dialogue. Finally, I will conclude by describing the ways in which both pieces leverage their characters.

"The Swimmer," by John Cheever, illustrates one man's journey from a typical suburban life to loneliness and isolation. This short story is characteristic of John Cheever's typical characterizations of suburbia, with all it's finery and entrapments. Cheever has been noted for his "skill as a realist depicter of suburban manners and morals" (Norton, p. 1861). Yet this story presents a deeper look into Neddy Merril's downfall from the contentment of a summer's day to the realization of darker times.