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Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed

The Swimmer

by John Cheever

1964

Short Story

Cheever's story concerns that desperate search for meaning and importance that underlies all human life, especially in the modern age, when man's acts may at first glance appear either comic or absurd.

“The Swimmer” begins as a comic fiction written in the realist mode. As Cheever's well-to-do suburbanites sit around the Westerhazy's pool, complaining that they drank too much the night before, one of their number, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim to his home, eight miles away across affluent Westchester County, New York, via his neighbors' pools. As Neddy begins his odyssey along what he calls the Lucinda River (named for his wife), the reader is struck by Neddy's strength, determination, and youthful exuberance. No longer one of the story's comically hungover, exurbanites, he becomes an explorer and mythic hero.

In the first few pages of Cheever's story, Neddy covers four miles in one hour swimming in eight of the fifteen pools. Gradually, however, the pace of the story and of the swim slows, and the pools grow farther apart as Neddy's energy and optimism drain away. Motion turns into contemplation, joyous adventure into painful ordeal. Appropriately, the light comedy gives way to a darker, more somber mood as the realism turns imperceptibly into mythic nightmare. The brightness and freedom of the first pages turns into the darkness and confinement of the last.

At the journey's and the story's end, Neddy finally and wearily arrives at his house, only to find it empty and boarded up. His mythic swim across the county and ahead in time has actually been a journey back into Neddy's past and down through his unconscious mind. His attempt to regain all he has lost—his youth, money, wife, and family—ends in failure, leaving the reader to ponder whether the attempt has been mythically noble or childishly ridiculous.

Neddy is clearly a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, one who longs to escape from the painful facts of his actual existence and to return to an earlier, more hopeful, more innocent period. Having lost his world, Neddy, however, gains a certain measure of tragic dignity, standing as naked and dispossessed in Westchester as Shakespeare's Lear howling on the storm-ravaged heath.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Cheever, John. "The Swimmer." Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed, edited by Editors of Salem Press, Salem Press, 2015. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=6CR_0529.
APA 7th
Cheever, J. (2015). The Swimmer. In E. Salem Press (Ed.), Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Cheever, John. "The Swimmer." Edited by Editors of Salem Press. Recommended Reading: 600 Classics Reviewed. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2015. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.