Essay on John Cheever the Swimmer

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."

Tim Winton’s short story, ‘The Water Was Dark and it Went Forever Down’, depicts a nameless, adolescent girl who is battling the voices inside her head along with the powerful punishments at the hands of her inebriated mother. The key concerns of life and death are portrayed through the girl’s viewpoint as she compares her life with her sad, depressed mother. Anonymous as she is, the girl constantly makes an attempt to escape the outbursts, that come as a result to her mother’s drinking, by submerging herself into the water. An extended metaphor is used when expressing the girl as a machine and her will to continue surviving in her sombre life.

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

By the time the alcohol touches the tongue, the storm has already begun. John Cheever’s relationship with alcohol presents itself throughout the short story “The Swimmer”, and uses the character, Ned Merrill, to represent the struggles he was experiencing. Addiction and the need for alcohol drove this character into a storm he couldn't retreat from. In “The Swimmer” Cheever uses a physical storm and the changes in the weather to show the path of drinking and becoming an alcoholic. The short story begins with joy and excitement, then turns into something casual and frequent, but eventually leads to misfortune and a misery. Nobody desires to be led to an unpleasant storm, that comes with drinking alcohol. Cheever uses nature and the storms to represent the life of an alcoholic.

“The Swimmer,” a short fiction by John Cheever, presents a theme to the reader about the unavoidable changes of life. The story focuses on the round character by the name of Neddy Merrill who is in extreme denial about the reality of his life. He has lost his youth, wealth, and family yet only at the end of the story does he develop the most by experiencing a glimpse of realization on all that he has indeed lost. In the short story “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses point of view, setting and symbolism to show the value of true relationships and the moments of life that are taken for granted.

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.

At the beginning of Le Thi Diem Thuy’s novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, water provides a refuge to the narrator and her family by functioning as a pathway to a new and secured life. This water signifies a new beginning and becomes a dwelling place where the narrator retreats when searching for answers. As the narrator progresses in the story, her understanding of life also develops, and water in the story becomes a barrier; it never truly provides the answers or fixes the issues that engulf the narrator’s family like a surf on the beach. Instead, the water reflects the traumatic reality within the narrator’s life, whether she realizes it or not. Essentially, in The Gangster We Are All Looking For, water functions as a pathway and a barrier which illuminate the trauma that the narrator and her family experience in their lives after Vietnam’s colonization.

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.

Mrs. Wright and Margarita are timely examples of the age old saying, "You've pushed me too far." Both of them were pushed throughout life to live up to someone else's expectations and in their own way they break and handle it they only way they know how. The women are under constant pressure to be someone that another person expects them to be and both women begin giving in to the expectations they can no longer live up to. Mrs. Wright lashes out in revenge while Margarita gives in and almost falls to her death. The characters both symbolize exactly what overwhelming emotions can do to a person and how in fact they may handle it.

The world of Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” exists through the mostly unemotional eyes of the character Nick. Stemming from his reactions and the suppression of some of his feelings, the reader gets a sense of how Nick is living in a temporary escape from society and his troubles in life. Despite the disaster that befell the town of Seney, this tale remains one of an optimistic ideal because of the various themes of survival and the continuation of life. Although Seney itself is a wasteland, the pine plain and the campsite could easily be seen as an Eden, lush with life and ripe with the survival of nature.

Under the enormous movement of Realism lies a branch known as Suburban Realism, and-- although Suburban Realism is not as highly recognized -- stories that contain such a form usually take on characters that are depressed and bleak. Not many authors are able to be used as prime examples for Suburban Realism, but two of the more famous that can be nominated are John Cheever and John Updike with their captivating stories “The Swimmer” and “Separating,” respectively. “The Swimmer” is a short story where a man named Neddy Merrill, who lives in an affluent neighborhood and has a more prestigious social standing, is going to swim home through every one of his neighbor’s pools, but does not realize as he is doing so that life is fleeting away right before his very eyes. As he makes his way from pool to pool, he starts to lose his strength and has

Reaching a goal faces a lot of obstacles, but overcoming them is what matters the most. “The Swimmer”, by John Cheever gives a prospective on what it’s like having to face certain obstacles and situation on his eight miles home. Neddy masked reality completely the cause of it was his drinking hobbies, but his strengths made him discover his biggest weakness.The desire that he had for swimming motivated him to meet new friends along his journey back home. The uncommon route he took on his journey home gave him the feeling that he was an explorer, and he knew that all along the way he would find his friends. Neddy’s option to swim back home by a different route led him to find out some things that he didn’t expect. “Why, we heard that you sold

The average person from suburban America can be either valiant, pathetic, or both. This is the description of an American suburbanite according to John Cheever, an American novelist and short story writer during the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Cheever, an award winning writer, balances hope, uncertainty, and anxiety in his stories’ characters. In Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, the main character, Neddy Merrill, incorporates this description into his actions. The actions of Neddy Merrill can be compared to those of Francis Weed, the main character of Cheever’s “The Country Husband”. “The Swimmer” and “The Country Husband”, however different the plots of each may be, each analyze the suburban

It is for many reasons that an author may alter time in a piece of literature. John Cheever accelerates time in a somewhat subtle way in his short story The Swimmer to show the effect that alcoholism has on Neds perception of reality.

In his story, The Swimmer, John Cheever does a clever job engaging the reader in understanding the complexity and change in Ned Merrill’s life circumstances through his travels to various pools. It is implied that Ned was once successful and had everything. He had a wife, named Lucinda, and children. He had a beautiful home and a circle of friends. It seemed like he had it all. However, his travel through pools and time, show the reader that Ned’s life is not all that it seems. At the time that story begins, Ned is visiting at a friend’s pool and decided to swim through all of the neighborhood pools until he arrives home. Cheever uses Ned’s journey in travelling to the pools and swimming in them to symbolize his life. At first, Ned