The Importance Of Reality In John Cheever's The Swimmer

We ignore it, we do not realize it and we certainly do not want to come to terms with it but at the end of the day, irrespective of how we, humans, feel about it, the passage of time is inevitable. Time is taken for granted, it is not something we pay much attention to in our everyday lives – most of us cannot even afford to do so. Our lives are slow, as is the process of realizing that we are gradually being absorbed into oblivion, disappearing bit by bit in our own time and turning ourselves into mere memories that in the grand scheme of things are virtually irrelevant. The Swimmer by John Cheever is a short story that, in an incredibly accurate manner, illustrates how the neglect of reality can impair a person’s judgment and understanding of time, and negatively influence their lives. Perhaps, the larger idea the story points to is that regardless of how hard we try to overlook it, we cannot prevent time from passing – it simply is not within the boundaries of human capabilities. However, the story implicitly suggests that there are certain ways to stop the passage of time in one’s mind (it does not affect the passage of time in reality whatsoever), although they come with consequences which, if faced, are hard to bear with.

The story of Neddy Merill (the main character of The Swimmer) is a tragic one, yet it also is an excellent representation of the mid-life crisis most adults face. The duration of the events taking place in the story is just one day. Interestingly