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The Swimmer
In this world there have been a lot of successful people who by hard work have achieved what they wanted in life. We see this all the time in today’s world. Every Up rise must have a downfall like usual. Some of these successful individuals may be celebrities or just common people in our communities. One thing for sure is that when you have an addiction to something, that addiction can take you all the way to where you started or even lower. We’ve seen this in celebrities. When there at their climax of their careers, suddenly you notice there involved in some kind of addiction, which makes them fall down that ladder.
The swimmer is a story that has a lot of interpretations in which we can relate to. The story starts out by introducing Neddy whom in this case is the main character. Neddy is by a poolside with some friends having some drinks and feels young and energetic and decides to get to his home by swimming in all the pools he comes across. The story continues as an adventure for him. He swims in all his neighbors’ pools and in every house he stops in, there’s a unique situation going on. At first I though he was under the influence or on some type of drug. When the story reaches the end we see that Neddy has lost it all. The story has a twist to it in which we have to read carefully to understand it. The two criticisms I will use in this text are Marxist Criticism and Psychological Criticism.
The novel really describes how Neddy basically throws away all his life. When the story starts he is a young man who gives us an impression that he is rich and has been successful in his life till that day. When we go straight to the ending we see that he has lost everything, but how has that happened? The story stat...
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... story can relate to many of us and we can relate to some of Neddy’s actions too. In today’s world on can also go from being somebody to being nobody in a blink of an eye. The choices we do in life can sometimes hurt us or sometimes help us. Depending on the person’s situation we can sometimes understand why they got to the point of falling down to the lowest level. Some people choose to go there because of an addiction but in other cases people don’t choose it and life just takes them there. In Neddy’s case I believe he choose to be there because he seem to be someone who was just wasting his money with friends and once he had wasted all his money he asked his neighbors for some money on loan. After all this story makes good connections with the world and really makes us open our eyes and see how fast time can pass and we will just get old and time will not stop.
In the article “Swimming for Her Life” by Kristin Lewis the main character Yusra Is a 18 year reefuge who is a olympic swimmer who faces many problems early in life. She and her sister had to flee their country because of terrorists and war. There where not many countries that would allow refugees into their country. So they had to hire a smuggler to get them to germany. While they rode on a boat to greece The motor stopped working so yusra and her sister had to jump in the water and push the boat for three hours. After they got to Greece they had to walk for 25 days to get to germany. Finally they got there and they were very luckie to find a refugee camp. Then when the olympics started they announced that there would be a refugee swim team.
Therefore, Ned had to learn from the ones that taught Ned to become a cattle thief and bush ranger. “As role models he had his uncle and cousin. If they taught anything, it wasn’t how to be an honest law abiding citizen. A dozen of his relative had criminal records.” (Wilkinson, 2002, p. 10). Just like what is expected Ned became a horse and cattle thief, but that didn’t last long. He was sent to prison for receiving a stolen horse that he didn’t know. After two years of hard life in prison, Ned decided to never go there again. Therefore Ned decided to get a job at a timber mill. Ned spent the last three years of hard work at his job, he was a trusted worker and overseer. Even so every time a horse or cattle went missing, the police would always blame it on Ned or his family. Some might’ve been true, but most of them were fake, yet regardless of true or false Ned still had to take the consequence. Nothing will change if he lived his life being harass. For this reason, he became a
John Cheever uniquely crafted the story “The Swimmer” by using a mix of surrealism and realism throughout the story. Most people when they read “The Swimmer” they have to reevaluate it to comprehend what is happening. The reason for that is because Cheever shifts between surrealism and realism so much that the reader does not even notice. The story starts out with Neddy being so strong and youthful, but as the story goes on he weakens and ages. When he was youthful Neddy decided to swim every pool in his neighborhood. As he ages and weakens, the pools get harder to swim and the seasons pass without him even noticing.
The novel, The Color of Water follows the author and narrator James McBride, and his mother Ruth’s life. It explores their childhood—when they were both embarrassed by their mothers—through the part of their lives where they began to accept themselves for who they are. Moreover, this memoir is quite distinctive as McBride cleverly parallels his story to his mother, Ruth’s story using dual narration. This technique further helps contribute to the theme of self-identity. Throughout the novel, McBride searches for identity and a sense of belonging that derives from his multiracial family. By using two different narrations, McBride gradually establishes his identity and by integrating both narratives at the end, McBride also shows that although both narrators at the beginning had different upbringings, in the end they came together, and understood each other’s perspective.
In The Color of Water, author James McBride writes both his autobiography and a tribute to the life of his mother, Ruth McBride. In the memoirs of the author’s mother and of himself, they constantly face discrimination from their race in certain neighborhoods and of their religious beliefs. The trials and tribulations faced by these two characters have taught readers universally that everyone faces difficulties in life, but they can all be surmounted.
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
Sally Satel, author of “Addiction Doesn’t Discriminate? Wrong,” leads us down a harrowing path of the causes and effects that lead people to addiction. It can be a choice, possibly subconscious, or a condition that leads a person left fighting a lifelong battle they did not intend to sign up for. Mental and emotional health/conditions, personality traits, attitudes, values, behaviors, choices, and perceived rewards are just a few of the supposed causes of becoming an addict.
Neddy’s character is very similar to Charlie from “Babylon Revisited”. Charlie was very fortunate, he lost both his wife and his daughter due to his uncontrollable alcoholism. However, after “controlling” his drinking problem, he decides that he wants nothing to do with his past life.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Through symbolism the author shows us how Neddy goes from social drinking to destitution. Each stop at a neighbor’s pool gets progressively harder, but he keeps on. Neddy ignores these signs and becomes beaten and finally alone. This truly is a sad journey of a man who destroys himself through alcohol. As the story ends, Neddy realizes that he is alone. Will he change? Get help for his alcoholism? The author leaves us hanging, but at this point we know he is alone, everyone has abandoned him. Neddy has followed the stereotypical footsteps of an alcoholic.
This is then followed by insightfully examining the treatment process, specifically through grace as a key focus of overcoming addiction. May focus heavily on desire as the main cause of addiction. He sees addiction as a way to fulfill a universal need that all people have. The text focuses on how we all have this need we want met and that we desire to have more in life. The author looks at how through our desire we all fall victims to addiction because of the fall.
These changes getting older weaker, act as a metaphor for a larger portion of Neddy’s life than the literal journey he undertakes on this afternoon. He has lost his social standing, his money, his wife and children and possibly his mind. In other words, his entire life.
...or granted. Neddy's desire to swim home does not end the way he would like it to. He is at the end of his journey, and is now faced with reality. He is all alone, and has lost everything he thought made him successful. He started out as a social drinker just like everyone else. He started to need alcohol, and became an embarrassment to his family and friends. He drank more to avoid his problems. His alcoholism led to his affair, and the end of his marriage to Lucinda. His denial led to his desperate pleas for money and alcohol from his friends. He ruined his social and financial standing. In the end, Neddy Merrill destroyed his American dream.
John Cheever’s The Swimmer is a piece that is very unique, and unlike many works, it is running on two different time scales. One time scale is running on the readers time scale, as he is journeying from pool to pool. The second time scale can be interpreted as over the course of many years, as his life passes him by and he realizes by the end that he has lost his house and his family, yet due to his suburban upper class living, he has not even noticed that this has occurred. This alone makes it unlike many other works; however, the Swimmer is argued to have alluded to other classic works. This includes allusions to classic works by Homer and F. Scott Fitzgerald most notably. In William Rodney Allen’s critique he asserts that The Swimmer alludes primarily to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Terence Bowers believes there is allusion primarily to The Odyssey, which he believes is written in the same structure and with similar protagonist characters. In both critiques, there is a large emphasis placed on the similarities between the protagonist characters of each work. Allen asserts that Ned Merrell is very similar to Jay Gatsby, and Terence Bowers sees Ned as more of an Odysseus. Each source provides examples for their argument; however there is room to make argument against this as well. In the Swimmer, there are definite allusions to these classic great works, however, Cheever sets his work apart in many ways, and adds his own uniqueness to this piece.
The entire story was a symbol of Needy’s life. The setting in the story was symbolic to the way Needy was feeling. Needy’s life was diminishing right before his eyes, and he did not realize it. The different changes in the story represented how much Needy’s life had gradually changed over time. By reading the story the reader can tell that Needy was in a state of denial.
He has grown up in the backwash of a dying city and has developed into an individual sensitive to the fact that his town’s vivacity has receded, leaving the faintest echoes of romance, a residue of empty piety, and symbolic memories of an active concern for God and mankind that no longer exists. Although the young boy cannot fully comprehend it intellectually, he feels that his surroundings have become malformed and ostentatious. He is at first as blind as his surroundings, but Joyce prepares us for his eventual perceptive awakening by mitigating his carelessness with an unconscious rejection of the spiritual stagnation of his community. Upon hitting Araby, the boy realizes that he has placed all his love and hope in a world that does not exist outside of his imagination. He feels angry and betrayed and comes to realize his self-deception, describing himself as “a creature driven and derided by vanity”, a vanity all his own (Joyce). This, inherently, represents the archetypal Joycean epiphany, a small but definitive moment after which life is never quite the same. This epiphany, in which the boy lives a dream in spite of the disagreeable and the material, is brought to its inevitable conclusion, with the single sensation of life disintegrating. At the moment of his realization, the narrator finds that he is able to better understand his particular circumstance, but, unfortunately, this