John Cheever The Swimmer Analysis

The Swimmer by John Cheever is a short story about a man who decides to swim the county, and by this I do not mean a river through the county, I mean he dove into every swimming pool in the county and swam the distance of it then ventured on to the next until he arrived back home, or what he thought was home. Neddy Merrill is a man who plays out his life as problem free. He has a perfect family; he lives in a higher class neighborhood, and has high social standings. Throughout the story Ned explains how he accepts and rejects invitations to other people’s gatherings based on a social hierarchy. He is well known around the community and has many friends as well as acquaintances. Since he is so well known he thinks he is able to go from home to home and pool to pool uninvited, and he does this because he knows that he will be accepted wherever he goes. Ned begins to realize though that all of his

close friends haven’t seen him in a while and most of them are pleasantly surprised when he arrives at their homes to swim the length of their pool. This is due to all of his rejections over the years. For example, he didn’t know his best friend had gotten ill and had an operation, nor did he know some of his friends had moved away, and he is now going through some sort of hardship that is requiring him to lose his family and money. As the short story goes on Neddy begins to lose his youthful ways and his health begins to deteriorate. He gets weaker and weaker with each drink he drinks and each swim he swims. This shows how Ned is beginning to age and stir towards dying. Everything he once had, his family, his children, his money, his mistress, and his money are all gone and by the end of the story, when he makes it back to what he thought was his homes he realizes he has nothing, that he is left all alone. I believe this story has a lot to do with Psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theory and stages of death.
Even though there are not any specific psychologists or psychological theories mentioned in the text it is quite obvious that the main character suffers from the five sequential stages when facing death. In the short story it states how he gets weaker throughout his journey. We know the journey of Neddy Merrill, The Swimmer, is a drawn out adventure through time. We can interpret this due to the details stated such as the leaves changing colors and the air getting cooler. The author starts out the story stating how Ned wasn’t the youngest of them all but how he sure did act like it. The author states, “He was a slender man—he seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while he was far from young he had slid down his banister that morning…” (Cheever)By the end of the short story Neddy was not so youthful anymore. He was diminishing, weak, and tired. He was aging, and closing in on death. “He staggered with fatigue on his way to the Clydes' and paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home.” (Cheever) Through the story Ned questioned his memory also. He was in the first stage of facing reality, or facing death. That stage is Denial. This is when people say things like “this can’t be true!”, or ignore and act against their problems, for example, Neddy acting younger than he really was is his way of denying his age. Another example of this stage is when he told one of his friends that he had not sold his house and everything was fine.
Next is the stage of bargaining. We saw Ned go through this stage in the middle of the story. He masks his lack of strength with drinks of gin. At every house he stops to swim he gets weaker but asks for a drink, as if this will keep him be fueled and going, or young forever. This falls in the stage of bargaining. In this stage people will do anything to just stay alive, or in Ned’s case, not grow old or grow up. Right before Neddy reaches his house he has to swim through his old mistress’s pool. When leaving he begins to cry, and realizes he has lost everything dear to him. This stage is the depression stage, or when people mourn about what they are going through. By the end of the story, when he arrives at the house he once lived at with his wife and daughters, he realizes he is all alone.
In my psychology class, we have learned about death and dying.

It states “Confronting our own death is the last major crisis we face in life…. Kübler-Ross agrees that not all people go through the same stages in the same way and regrets that anyone would use her theory as a model for a “good” death.” (Carpenter&Huffman) In the story Ned’s mind seemed to almost be in a tunnel vision type state. He wanted to achieve his goal of swimming across the county but didn’t realize what was going on in everyday life. He almost seemed as if he didn’t want to deal with it, and he lived like that for so long that by the time reality confronted him he was confused and didn’t know what was going on. A famous psychologist once said “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” (Freud) This explains how Ned’s illusion of happiness and wealth collided with reality when he returned to his old

home.
Next I would like to point out that John Cheever laid out this story in a way that would make us see the big picture. After reading this short story numerous times I was able to see not only the main character’s way of life but his entire timeline of events from the time he got in the first pool to the time he got out of the last and stumbled his way up the drive way of the home he use to reside in. This shows that the structure of this short story was well thought out and planned, but yet kept concealed until one could realize and open their mind and see, because when I first read this story I didn’t understand it what so ever. I was almost mad that Cheever ended it the way he did, so I reread the story a few more times until I finally got it and the details made sense.
In conclusion, this short story is a timeline of a man’s life, a man who is in denial and going through the stages of aging and death. Throughout the story he goes through all of the stages accept one. This story is very well structurally laid out and makes readers really look into the true meaning of why characters are doing the things they are doing and why details such as the leaves changing are being stated.