"The Swimmer"
John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” begins at a pool party, where a man named Neddy Merrill observes his wife and friends while drinking gin. His house is eight miles south, and he sees in his mind’s eye a map of the county in between. He imagines himself swimming through the backyard pools of various friends and neighbors and decides to do so. Throughout his journey, Neddy hops through hedges to get to private pools, continuing to drink and getting progressively more worn out. Throughout the narrative, the reader is offered small insights into Neddy’s wealthy suburban life. A turning point in the story is when Neddy comes upon the Welchers' pool, which has been drained. He struggles to remember when he last saw the Welchers, and the reader begins to understand the delicate nature of social relations in Neddy’s world. After the empty pool, Neddy gets ridiculed as he crosses a highway in only his swim trunks. Later, Neddy’s conversation with someone whose pool he swims in reveals more about his home life, which is less glamorous than the story Neddy tells himself in his head. Eventually, after a few more disastrous social run-ins, Neddy arrives at his house. The house is dark and locked, and Neddy can’t get in; at the end of the story, we are left with the assumption that Neddy has had some kind of socioeconomic downfall, and he has been lying to himself about where he lives for the whole story. Throughout the narrative, readers are presented with the reality that exists in Neddy’s head: one where he is the ideal traditional United States man, a social dominator and great explorer. By the end, we find that this is not quite the case.
Analysis
In trying to find examples of energy afterlives in this text, I kept arriving at the connection between colonial and industrial afterlives. When Neddy thinks about his journey, he phrases it as a journey down a river. He imagines himself as a “pilgrim” and “explorer,” but because where he lives has been so overdeveloped, the only exploration he is able to conduct is that of his community. Colonial afterlives go hand-in-hand with energy ones in this story. With the colonial connection, I found the prominence of alcohol in the story compelling, since Neddy meets every setback with a desire to consume more alcohol. The need to both imagine himself as an explorer and numb himself from his contemporary suburban life speaks to the alienation from purpose that comes as a result of the hyper-colonized and hyper-industrialized post-war society Neddy finds himself in. It is difficult to trace the specifics of this experience back to coal, oil, or nuclear energy, but the ideologies that lead to and justify energy extraction are the same ones that create Neddy’s conditions and actions. One of the larger afterlives in the story is the presence of chlorinated water, which came about through the industrial revolution. Though he imagines it a river, the pool water Neddy swims through is human-created. While the U.S. imagination remains deeply connected to Manifest Destiny, especially at the time of the story’s writing, a man like Neddy with a desire to see himself as appropriately masculine must take up the task of exploring.
Visual Creation
To visualize this text, I originally wanted to make a large river made up of connected pools and pull out the specific aspects of each part of Neddy’s journey to describe how energy and colonial afterlives fit into his experience. I tried to do this, but it did not pan out the way I imagined it, so I scrapped it in favor of the representation I have now. Once I realized the visual timeline wasn’t working, I pasted the text into Voyant Tools and spent a good chunk of time messing around with their tools to analyze the words in the text. I found the bubble timelines really interesting, and I liked that it was easy to display multiple at once. I tried a bunch of different combinations of words, but in the end I chose “water*” and “explorer” because when combined they show the intersections of energy and colonial afterlives in the story. Though Neddy also refers to himself as a “pilgrim,” I did not pull this out because both uses are next to uses of the word “explorer.” Once I generated the bubble graph with Voyant Tools, I used Canva to generate graphs to put with the timelines. The two graphs show how liquids are referenced in the story and help illustrate the prominence of human-created liquids over natural ones in this story. Although a reader might notice that the story features frequent references to pool water, only by graphing this data can we see how disproportionately high these references are. I was surprised by the finding that of the twenty-eight appearances of the word water*, only two were in reference to natural water (in relation to the storm). While a traditional analysis might have looked at the emphasis on pool water, the specific data helps illuminate how strong these afterlives are.
Works Cited
Cheever, John. “‘The Swimmer,’ by John Cheever.” The New Yorker, 11 July 1964, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/07/18/the-swimmer.
