The Themes Of Symbolism In The Swimmer By John Cheever

This image of a beach created by Slessor is ironic as the image he created is peaceful and associated with life and pleasure while the poem showing it to be the complete opposite with the beach representing pain and death. Slessor also uses images of Christ and destruction and evil. The “cross” is meant to symbolise Christ and the pain of war while a ‘stake of tidewood’ represents a sharp instrument of evil and destruction as well as the image bodies have been brought in by the tide, or nature. Dawe also uses imagery, creating a graphic image of an Australian stuck in war with his use of diction using racist phrases such as “mob of little yellows”, and “their rotten fish-sauce breath” as well as common Australian clichés such as “copped the bloody lot” and “if you had one more

Alice Neel and Egon Schiele were some of the most daring artists of their time. Neel was especially known for her uncaring attitude of what was “in” at the time, while Egon Schiele was similarly known to paint some of the most bold nude figures of his time. Both painted what they wanted, not a thought towards what was socially acceptable. They both focused on painting people around them, or in Neel’s case, random people on the street, and Schiele was often compared to Picasso in his obsession with self-portraits. Either way, while Alice Neel and Egon Schiele were from opposite sides of the planet, they shared a remarkably similar style of painting and rendering of the subjects in those paintings.

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.

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.

Finding home boarded up; a sensation of coldness and unwelcoming takes over. Sudden misfortunes arise from what was once a perfect life, and the world appears upside-down. Attempts to remember what went wrong fail. Memories are unclear and time seems blurry. At one time, John Cheever found himself in this position, using alcohol to ignore his problems. John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1912. In 1941, he moved to suburban Westchester and eventually became addicted to alcohol, which is a recurrent motif in many of his short stories. He died in 1982 from cancer. In his short story, "The Swimmer," an affluent man named Neddy Merrill decides to swim through all of the pools in his county to reach his own house. The

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 quote from John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” shows how the protagonist, Neddy, fails to realize and accept the fact of reality, and only tries to escape from it. As the narrator indicates that Neddie is actually incapable of realizing the rudeness from the caterer’s barkeep and the mistress, readers might presume that Cheever is actually using these two characters to present the issue of social class and love as both are inevitably connected with the reality that the protagonist couldn’t dare to face. However, the issue of love and social class are actually part of the reason that why the process of growing up is so painful to the young as they start to realize that reality is cruel as no one is actually free in society and people are all restricted

The short story of “The Swimmer,” by Cheever begins with imagery to provide the backdrop and the setting for the protagonist, Ned Merrill. The descriptions provided by Cheever give us the idea of a suburb where many people engage in playful behavior, individuals are generally wealthy, and in many instances engage in some overindulgence with alcohol.

     "The Swimmer" by John Cheever describes Neddy Merril's "swim" home. Neddy is a husband and a father, he is also a drunk. The story encompasses about twenty years of his life of alcohol which ruined not only him but also his relationship with his family. One day after waking up with a hangover he drinks a little and decides to swim home. It is obvious he is a drunk because he is constantly searching for a drink on his swim home.

"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.

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.

Whiteley’s works parallels Van Gogh’s in its deliberate use of symbols in his paintings and while Whiteley observed many of the principles of Symbolism, his had its own unique facility of Surrealist attached. This can be appreciated in Night Café (1972) [refer Appendix 3] where Whiteley depicted Van Gogh’s The Night Café (1888) [refer Appendix 1] and distorted the image and took the lines of the room to a vanishing point, idealising Whiteley’s Surrealist style. Whiteley’s use of symbolism in his works is outstandingly illustrated in Whiteley’s Archibald Prize winning self-portrait Art, Life and the Other Thing (1978) [refer Appendix 4] where Whiteley demonstrates the controversy of the Archibald in his representation of the William Dobell’s controversial winning portrait of Joshua Smith (1943) [refer Appendix 5] and John Bloomfield’s disqualification from the Archibald 1975 because of his portrait that was deemed to be painted from a picture of Tim Burstall. Whiteley represents these two controversies in his triptych self-portrait containing a photograph of how he looks in real life, a mixed media self-portrait, and a depiction of a baboon symbolising the metaphorical “monkey on his back”. Whitely once said “the fundamental reason one paints is in order to see”, describing how he thinks that his art is a method granting means of communication to his audience.

Before Los Angeles, before their successful careers, David Hockney and Christopher Isherwood were both just two boys from England. Christopher Isherwood, who was born in the year 1904—roughly thirty years before David Hockney was born—was a privileged young boy as he was related to a country squire. Even though he was privileged, Christopher’s family was incomplete due to his distant parents. With his parents being distant, and having to be sent to boarding school at age 8, it created a sense of loneliness for Christopher. Luckily, Christopher formed friendships over the years to fill the void; a couple of his friends being Wynstan Auden and Edward Upward. In 1925, Christopher was expelled from Cambridge University due to not taking his