The Swimmer by Joakim Zander

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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.

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