The Swimmer

The Swimmer by John Cheever, is a short story, written in the late 50’s, early 60’s. The story takes place in a high class suburb, and is an extreme metaphor for the life of drunkenness and negligence. The story is about a mid-aged man named Neddy Merrill. One Sunday, after a drunken Saturday night party, Ned is found drinking and laughing with his wife and other close friends. He decides to swim the eight-mile route back to his home, bouncing from one pool to another. But as the tides change, Ned will discover that more has changed than he has hoped. The story itself is set in third person limited. Although, at certain points in the story, the narrator switches to second person, in order to express or draw the reader into the situation. “You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium…” {Cheever 210} The narrator uses third person limited in order to portray the events of the plot, while also hiding important themes and events until the end. For example, when Ned is swimming through the old couple’s pool, Mrs. Halloran mentions, “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about all your misfortunes, Ned”…

The aquatic adventure of Neddy Merrill embarked upon John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” seemed at first to be the light-hearted and innocent idea of a middle-aged man in a very affluent community, but quickly changed. In 1964, John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” was published in the The New Yorker. In a world full of wealth and luxury, Cheever was successful at adding deception within the text to create the main character, Neddy Merrill, whose perfect life was diminished in only a short period of…

Different Life Stages as Portrayed through the Use of Setting and the Main Character in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” In “The Swimmer,” John Cheever uses the setting and the character of the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, as the main devices to highlight the theme of the different four stages of human life. “The Swimmer” is a short story by John Cheever. It was published on July 18, 1964. The story reflects the author’s analysis of the main character, Neddy Merrill. The protagonist decides to swim…

The Swimmer - two presentations, two experiences The movie The Swimmer is based on a short-story by John Cheever. In it, a man named Neddy Merrill decides he is going to swim through a series of his neighbors swimming pools in an effort to get home. Along the way, he finds out that things that he thought about his life and himself are not what they seem. Both the movie and the short story follow a similar plot line, but by comparing the two closely, it is easy to see that there are many…

because Jewish women wear shawls during prayer or religious ceremonies. Therefore, it provides a certain level of security and warmth for the characters when they are faced with the harshness of their forced lifestyle in the concentration camp or the “cold, cold, coldness of hell.” Finally, through the various ways in which the characters react to the shawl, the reader picks up various ideas that Ozick is attempting to communicate. For example, by having Stella essentially heartless, Ozick is…

In The Swimmer written by John Cheever, Neddy Merrill, a father and husband, suffers from a self-destructing memory that makes him believe that different things are occurring or that specific events may of not even happened. Ned is a described as a slender, childish man that drinks heavily. He got the idea that he was going to swim “cross county” threw a trail of the neighbors’ swimming pools. He began to think he was an explorer, and took his new voyage very seriously. Ned decided to name his…

Cheever’s “The swimmer” is a journey through life-altering events in the aging years of a typical upper middle-class protagonist called Neddy. Beginning with a whimsical exercise of swimming his way home across various pools in his neighborhood, and through increasingly odd encounters with his neighbors, Neddy struggles to accept the unveiling reality of his present life. Cheever attempts to explore the workings of a mind out of touch with reality by using the unavoidable passage of time, the…

The swimming pools, in “The Swimmer”, represent Neddie’s journey down the road to addiction and the consequences that his dependency has on his life and body. Neddie’s state of mind as he begins his addiction is described, “He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools. […] To be embraced and sustained by the light green water was less a pleasure, it seemed, than the resumption of a natural condition,” (Cheever, 777). Neddie describes the feeling that drinking…

Nesma Elsamahy C. Potter ENG-112 18 April 2017 The swimmer "The Swimmer" is a short story composed by John Cheever, an American creator. The story has a mix of surrealism and authenticity and investigates rural America. The connection amongst bliss and riches is likewise investigated in the story. In the story, the creator has broadly utilized imagery and myth. "The Swimmer" is a tale about a man who swims every open and private pool he goes over on his eighth mile travel home. The story is most…

tense/retrospective narration are two different types of narrations used in literature. These narrations can be seen in Uplike’s “A & P” and Cheever’s “The Swimmer”. “A & P” is about a man named Sammy who works in a grocery store. He notices a group of three girls dressed in bathing suits walk in. As they walk around the store, Sammy cannot stop looking at them. As the story progresses, Lengel, the manager, ends up telling the girls they need to dress decently. Soon after this, Sammy quits his…