John Cheever's 'The Enormous Radio'

Eventually, the fun and laughter turn into something normal and boring, and drinking more serves to reanimate his social interactions. Unfortunately, those problems are only gone for a little while, and Ned Merrill finds this out the hard way by continuing his journey. Each house

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,” 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.

People swim through life, feeling comfortable with their surroundings and the people with them on this journey, but sometimes they might be exposed from this security blanket to realize that they aren’t who they thought they were. Extramarital affairs, depression, midlife crises, and loss of self are all aspects that might happen in someones life that eat away at relationships people form with their loved ones. In this short story, “The Swimmer.” John Cheever shows how all the literary devices of powerful metaphors, realistic imagery, and parallel diction combine into one to make a powerful story of how a person faces

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.

A small family of four, living in the Tory town of Redding. Life was great Mr. and Mrs. Meeker owned a small tavern that supplies their town with food, rum, and supplies. Their son Timmy helped around the tavern and did chores, because his older brother Sam was off at college. Everyone in Redding was close and knew the Meeker family, they all admired how they had raised Sam and Timmy. Every year after college was over, Sam would come home and visit, except one.

The society at the time as a whole is in decline. It was a time when "curtesy went out of style” and “teens cultivated decadence like a taste” (Boyle 189). They are in a town where drugs are

Charles Chesnutt uses real life scenarios to illustrate the meaning of his stories. He also was a socially conscious writer who addressed racial issues that shaped the cultural climate of his time. Chestnutt, as a writer, successfully passed as a white author for most of his career, which allowed him access unavailable to his identifiable black counterparts. Suprisingly, most of his work focused on black experiences during Reconstruction, but specifically “The Wife Of His Youth” captured much about the issues plaguing his society at the time through the racial theme and realism style of writing he incorporated.

In the short stories by Raymond Carver, he presents multiple normal, everyday situations and focuses on the ways that the participants react. The characters in his stories usually seem to be middle-aged, white, middle-class married couples that live normal lives, but come to a turning point that changes their lives and the way they see things. They end up gaining a whole new perspective on life and the way they though they felt. The stories start off normal, but then something happens that brings out their true character. Through this, Raymond Carver shows us who we are based on the character’s reactions. He presents these groups in a particular way to make us realize that although their situation may be a little weird, we are just like them. He justifies our human nature, which is one

To be a fly on the wall during someone’s most intimate, private conversations can be quite exciting to some. In John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio”, we learn what it’s like to be just that. Set on the twelfth floor of an apartment building in 1940s New York, the story is in third-person form narrated by an unnamed narrator. Jim and Irene Wescott are a middle-class married couple, with two young children. Mr. Wescott buys his wife an expensive radio as a gift to make her happy.

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

John Cheever’s story “The Enormous Radio” could be a modern allegory of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden due to its numerous parallels. Jim and Irene play the role of Adam and Eve, the radio hisses in their ears like a snake, and the information the couple learns from the radio is the fruit from the forbidden tree, tempting, but ultimately harmful.

A central theme occurring in “Maggie” is naturalism, and within this specific story, no one escapes their environmental and biological destiny. Stephan Crane highlights the harsh effects of urbanization and industrialization occurring within the story. Maggie’s parents are represented as unfit guardians: Her parents are not only abusive, but also display alcoholic tendencies. Regardless of Jimmie and Maggie’s desire to break away from the miserable life within bowery, they find themselves unable to.

To start off, throughout Walt Whitman's life he had experienced a variety of things that influenced his writing which, I think made him stand out from other writers of the late romantic period because he kind of had a different overall viewpoint. One of the first major things that influenced Whitman's overall viewpoint was the serious injury of his brother. According to an article by David Baker,

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, once declared “Lost time is never found again.” This quote ties to the meaning of how people frequently let time seep through their hands. John Cheever’s "The Swimmer" portrays this through the eyes of suburban man Neddy. Neddy is the average ‘Joe’ of most suburban households. Life in suburbia is repetitive in most scenarios, and humans can easily get lost in the monotonous adventure known aslife. Time leaks away from his figure, and he is not sure of he is the one changing too fast, or the world around him. "His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character's decorous social persona and inner corruption" (Kozikowski) supports this cause.