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John Cheever's story 'The Swimmer' depicts a protagonist, and the society that has nurtured him, as lacking in seriousness and responsibility.Neddy, the bewildered protagonist, represents a society satirized for centering its values on social status and materialism.

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A short summary of John Cheever's The Swimmer This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of The Swimmer. Search all of SparkNotes Search. Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. Much Ado About Nothing The Catcher in the Rye The Kite Runner. “The Swimmer” — John Cheever (1964) It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I. Too much last night.” 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. “The Swimmer” by John Cheever is a short story about Neddy Merrill and his journey through alcoholism. Alcoholism plays a detrimental role in Neddy Merrill’s life because it has been ruined due to his dependence on this awful substance.

Cheever, John. “The Swimmer.” Literature and the Writing Process. 5th ed. McMahan, Elizabeth; Susan X Day, and Robert Fund, eds. Upper Saddle River, N.J.:……….Prentice Hall, 1999. Pages 369-376.…….It is a hot Sunday in midsummer. At the pool of Donald and Helen Westerhazy, Lucinda Merrill confirms what all the guests know: that everyone drank too much the previous evening.

…….“It must have been the wine,” says Helen Westerhazy.
…….Neddy Merrill—a thin man with an athletic build—decides to swim home, going from one family pool to the next, until he covers all eight miles to his residence in Bullet Park.
…….“He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool,” the narrator says, “but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.”
…….Neddy removes a sweater draped on his shoulders and swims the Westerhazy pool, then crosses over to the Grahams’ pool in the next yard. When greeting him, Mrs. Graham says she had been trying to contact him all morning. She gets him a drink, and it appears he may have to stay awhile. However, a group of the Grahams’ friends arrives for a visit, and Neddy is able to sneak off.
…….Next, he swims the pools at the Hammers, the Lears, the Howlands, and the Crosscups, then crosses the street to the Bunkers, where more than two dozen people are attending a party. In the pool floating on a raft is Rusty Towers.
…….“Oh, look who’s here!” Enid bunker shouts, noting Neddy’s wife had told him that he wouldn’t be able to attend the Bunkers’ party. They exchange kisses, and she leads him to the bar. Along the way, he greets and kisses many of the women guests and shakes the hands of many of the men. After drinking a gin and tonic, he swims the pool, smiles at the Tomlinsons, and heads over to the Levy’s pool. He sees bottles and glasses around the pool but no people. After swimming the pool, he has a drink—his fourth or fifth that afternoon.
…….Storm clouds gather, and he hears thunder. An airplane is circling. A train whistle sounds, and Neddy thinks of the railroad station and waiting passengers. It begins to rain. He likes storms. He likes the way a storm blows open a door and the wind rushes up the stairs. He takes shelter in the Levys’ gazebo until the storm moves on. After leaving the gazebo, he notices something strange: the storm had blown down leaves with autumn colors—red and yellow—but it was summer.
…….He then goes to the Welchers’ pool. There is no water in it, and there are no signs of life in the house. He walks around to the front and sees a for-sale sign. He wonders, “When had he last heard from the Welchers—when, that is, had he and Lucinda last regretted an invitation to dine with them? It seemed only a week or so ago.”
…….Neddy then hears the sound of people playing tennis and heads off to his next challenge. But he must cross Route 424, busy with lines of traffic. As he stands on the shoulder of the road wearing only his swimming trunks, people mock him. Someone hurls a beer can at him. When an elderly driver slows down for him, he makes it to the grass divider in the middle of the road. There, he suffers more ridicule. After waiting ten or fifteen minutes, he manages to make it to the other side. He then goes to the public pool in the village of Lancaster. Signs indicate that swimmers must take a shower and footbath before entering the pool. They also must display an identification disk. Neddy takes a shower and washes his feet in a solution, then dives into the pool. It is crowded and stinks of chlorine. After he reaches the other end of the pool, two lifeguards cite him for not wearing an identification disk. However, he manages to escape and cross the road to the grounds of a wealthy elderly couple, the Hallorans. A hedge surrounds their pool.
…….“The Hallorans were friends . . . who seemed to bask in the suspicion that they might be Communists,” the narrator says. “They were zealous reformers but they were not Communists.”
…….He calls out to alert them that he is on their property. When they are at the poolside, they never wear bathing suits. So, before entering the pool area through the hedges, Neddy conforms to their practice by removing his trunks.
…….“I’m swimming across the county,” he tells them.
…….He leaves his trunks at one end of the pool, walks to the other end, and swims the length of the pool. While he is getting out, Mrs. Halloran says, “We’ve been terribly sorry to hear about your misfortunes, Neddy.”
…….Neddy, dumbfounded, says, “My misfortunes?”
…….“Why we heard that you’d sold the house and that your poor children . . . “
…….Neddy says he did not sell the house and his four daughters are at home.
…….She simply replies, “Yes, yes . . .”
…….He thanks her for the use of her pool and puts on his trunks. They feel loose. Is it possible, he wonders, whether he could have lost weight in a single afternoon? He also feels cold and weary, and his encounter with the Hallorans has depressed him. He goes a short way to the home of the Hallorans’ daughter, Helen Sachs, and asks for a drink to warm him. But she tells him that she and her husband, Eric Sachs, have not kept any alcoholic beverages in the house since Eric’s operation three years before. Neddy had forgotten about the operation. The narrator says, “Was he losing his memory, had his gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill?”
…….He swims the Sachs’s pool, barely making it, and crosses over to the Biswangers’ house, where a party is in progress. Numerous times, the Biswangers had invited Neddy and Lucinda Merrill to dinner, but the Merrills always snubbed them. They thought themselves above the Biswangers. When Neddy enters the pool area and heads for the bar, Neddy calls him a gate-crasher. Nevertheless, he asks whether he may pour himself a drink. “Suit yourself,” Grace Biswanger says.
…….While at the bar, he hears her talk about him: “They went for broke overnight—nothing but income—and he showed up drunk one Sunday and asked us to loan him five thousand dollars.” Neddy swims the pool, then goes to the next pool—that of Shirley Adams. He and she had had an affair, but he could not remember when—“last week, last month, last year.”
…….After walking toward her pool, he tells her that he is swimming across the county.
…….She says, “Will you ever grow up?”
…….Expecting him to ask for money, she says she will not give him any. When he asks for a drink, she refuses to provide one. She has company, a young man in the bathhouse. But Neddy still swims the pool. When he leaves, it is nightfall. He looks up at the stars but does not see any midsummer constellations. He cries. He feels cold, confused, downhearted. He needs a drink and dry clothes. But he swims the last two pools anyway, those of the Gilmartins and the Clydes. When he reaches home, the house is dark. He wonders whether Lucinda is still at the Westerhazy place. Perhaps the girls are there or went somewhere else. When he tries the garage doors, “rust came off the handles onto his hands.” The house is locked. He tries to force the door open, then looks inside. The house is empty.
Climax

Themes

John Cheever The Swimmer New Yorker

Cheever The Swimmer Youtube

Prior to this evening, I had never read anything by John Cheever, so I was quite unprepared to encounter a story with such a wealth of wit, imagination and insight. “The Swimmer” is impossibly dense, and I’m sure a blog post won’t do it justice. It is, by turns, hilarious and heartbreaking, casting an astute satire on suburban ennui while wisely dissecting human nature in broad strokes of the scalpel. The protagonist, Neddy Merrill, begins the story by undertaking a mission to “swim” across his suburban neighborhood, which in his limited scope of perspective means ambling from one gaudy house to the next, eking a drink out of his neighbors’ bars, swimming the length of their respective pools, and moving on. Even from the beginning of the story, I think Cheever’s aim is to examine the pratfalls of self-delusion or willful ignorance. We meet a character whose worldview is completely contained within the artifice of cocktail parties and the ensuing small talk that as far as he’s concerned, an “adventure” is merely a leisurely tour through the places he’s already been and the people he’s already met, all of which resemble one another uncannily. He considers his bizarre, meandering path a “stream” and names it after his wife, but it neither flows like a body of water nor resembles the processes of love. Cheever’s clever wordplay deliberately underplays the fact that a story billed as an epic journey is really just an account of a man getting drunk and systematically bothering his neighbors.

That is, until the story evolves into a surreal, Kafka-esque fantasy, at which point the implications of Cheever’s satire are inflated astronomically and Neddy’s stupid ramblings become allegorical of the universal tragedies of life. As his mission unfolds in a series of independently trite episodes, Neddy becomes apparently unhinged from time and space, a revelation that Cheever lets leak out very carefully, whetting the reader’s appetite with subtle and ambiguous foreshadowing. As an indeterminate amount of time passes, Neddy becomes vaguely aware of several extremely important events in his life that seem to have occurred while he was on his pointless crusade between drinks and swimming pools. He appears to have missed a love affair, a series of financial and familial tragedies, the illness of a close friend, and his own decline from a social dynamo (as far as he was concerned) to a pitiable pariah. The “point,” I think, can be oversimplified thusly: in circumstances bereft of variance or real interpersonal satisfaction, we find ways to distract ourselves from life and wind up blocking its most significant moments from our minds. Neddy gives himself an arbitrary goal, full of repetitive episodes, and follows it brainlessly, drunkenly, hopelessly. And in the process, his life simply moves on without him. I’ve only just read it for the first time, but “The Swimmer” strikes me as a close look at self-deception and cognitive dissonance. It’s about the ways we shield ourselves from painful memories and self-examination, about that moment we’re all doomed to reach when we look back on the events that most boldly marked our decades on this earth and feel as though we never saw them happen. Cheever deserves high marks for finding humor in this topic, and for presenting it in an entirely original manner. Some questions:

Cheever The Swimmer Full Text

1. This story pulls off a balancing act between the fantastically surreal and the bleakly realistic. Can this story succeed simultaneously as an allegory and a character study? Or does one interpretation cheapen the other?

Cheever The Swimmer Summary

2. This story can be read with varying degrees of literalism. Is Neddy like Rip Van Winkle, a regular man caught up in a bizarre anomaly of time? Or has this story occurred “in his head,” as it were? Are we reading about a regular person plagued by nightmarish circumstances, or is this story a portrait of a broken mind?

3. We never learn much about the events Neddy seems to have “missed” or “forgotten.” Does this lack of exposition service the story or lessen its impact? Why?