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Symbolism In John Cheever's The Swimmer

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John Cheever’s once said “Homesickness is nothing. Fifty percent of people in the world are homesick all the time.” Perhaps this thought of homesickness was Cheever’s basis for writing his short story The Swimmer. Through the story of the main character Neddy, Cheever uses several motifs and symbols to display two main themes, the inevitable passage of time and the emptiness of suburbia. Cheever’s eclectic structure, tone, motifs, and characters help to display the inevitable passage of time and the emptiness of suburbia. As Cheever begins the story he sets a scene for readers, a warm summers morning on the poolside, where friends sit and drink and recap the memorable events of last night. This exact place, on the poolside of the Westerhazy’s …show more content…

At the beginning of the story Neddy views not only himself but also his friends as extremely important social figures within their community and society. He knows every in and out of the world he inhabits. He accepts and declines invitations according to a rigid social hierarchy and engages in all the expected activities, tennis, drinking, sailing etc. Neddy believes he has many friends and because of this he is openly invited to hop from pool to pool, confident that his is welcome wherever he goes. If there was ever any unpleasantness that he encountered Neddy would opt to not see it, almost in a childlike state of reality. Although Neddy is no longer young, he still prides himself on his strength and vigor, believing that he is virtually invincible. However as Neddy undertakes his pool jumping journey he realizes that the discontent he is always stubbornly ignoring is more present in his life than he was grasping. He has made a bad habit of rejecting genuine invitations to events, and as friend after friend has said it’s been a long while since they have seen or heard from him. This makes it painfully apparent that he has distanced himself from those around him: he didn’t know his friend had been ill, or that some of his friends moved away, and he himself has suffered from great misfortune that in turn caused him to lose everything, even his family. As his journey goes on the health and strength he once prided himself on leaves his grasp and he becomes weaker and weaker. Contrary to his beliefs he is not going to have eternal youth, he is aging and getting closure to death. Everything that Neddy ever thought to have obtained - his family, his mistresses love, his wealth, his youth, and his social standing - have

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We ignore it, we do not realize it and we certainly do not want to come to terms with it but at the end of the day, irrespective of how we, humans, feel about it, the passage of time is inevitable. Time is taken for granted, it is not something we pay much attention to in our everyday lives – most of us cannot even afford to do so. Our lives are slow, as is the process of realizing that we are gradually being absorbed into oblivion, disappearing bit by bit in our own time and turning ourselves into mere memories that in the grand scheme of things are virtually irrelevant. The Swimmer by John Cheever is a short story that, in an incredibly accurate manner, illustrates how the neglect of reality can impair a person’s judgment and understanding of time, and negatively influence their lives. Perhaps, the larger idea the story points to is that regardless of how hard we try to overlook it, we cannot prevent time from passing – it simply is not within the boundaries of human capabilities.

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