In the short story ‘‘The Swimmer’’, written by John Cheever and published in the ‘’The Brigadier’’[1], we follow Neddy (Ned) Merrill through his journey home. While Ned swims home through the pools in his neighbourhood, the people around him change and some are not where they are supposed to be, and his memory fails him. When he finally arrives at his destination, he notices that something is terribly wrong.
The main character and protagonist in the story is Neddy Merrill, who decides to go home from his friends’ house by swimming through all the pools in his neighbourhood. Ned is married to Lucinda, and they both enjoy their high social standing in their rich neighbourhood. He, with his picture-perfect family, has few hitches in their lives and seems to see himself, and his friends, as blessed. He accepts and rejects invitations according to a inflexible social pyramid and engages in all kind of snobbish activities such as tennis, sailing and drinking gin. Ned has a lot of so called friends, and his place in the privileged world allows him to go from pool to pool uninvited. He lives in a make shift paradise, where there is no room for anything but health and happiness. If there is something unpleasant in his life, Ned opt not to see it.
As Ned starts his journey home through pools, he starts to realise that the unpleasantness that he stubbornly disregarded in his life was always there. Ned himself does not notice that the habit of rejecting invitations had distanced him