Which Direction is Ned Swimming?

In “The Swimmer,” Ned Merrill seems caught between wanting to free himself from all constraints and wanting to cling to memories of his family and his former life. He is happy and energetic at the beginning of the story, but as his mood changes, his reasons for swimming become unclear. Does he want to swim towards home, or does he want to swim away from his problems?

            The story explains that he takes a natural approach to life. For example, he prefers to swim without a bathing suit and he never uses a ladder to pull himself up from a pool. However, as he heads home, certain clues reveal that he remains tied down to his family. He names his river of swimming pools after his wife, Lucinda, and he reminisces about his daughters playing tennis.

            In the second half of the story, his collected image disintegrates.  He becomes increasingly depressed and he questions the reliability of his memory. By the time he gets to the public pool, he cannot follow the lifeguard’s rules because they are too confining. The next pools he visits suggest that home is where his problems await. Why can’t Ned accept this?  Is he just prolonging his acceptance of reality until the last possible moment?

Comments

[Eliezah D]

I think that Ned is mainly swimming just to get away from his problems. In the beginning of the story he actually doesn't have any problems, except a little hangover. It seems as though he just randomly decides to swim because he enjoys it. However, as the story goes on, his problems become more apparent and swimming loses its appeal very quickly. Now, since Ned's haven has dissapeared, and he realizes the depressing state of his life, he truly feels lonely and that he has nowhere to go.

Don't worry, I'll talk more about this tomorrow...

[Polly G]

The Swimmer was a confusing but interesting story. As I was reading, I thought that Neddy’s swim across the county could be considered a symbolic journey. At the beginning of the story, there is drunken happiness and the days are warm. Neddy considers himself a “legendary figure” and seems well respected by his community. However, as his journey progresses, Neddy questions his memory and the days become gloomy and cold. Through conversations with friends and neighbors, it is clear that Neddy’s social status has dropped and that people consider him incompetent. At the end, Neddy breaks down in tears. I think at this point, he realizes that he can no longer refuse to accept his family’s misfortunes. As Eliezah stated, swimming had lost its appeal and Neddy may have realized his problems.

[Selena P.]

I agree that Ned was "swimming" to escape from his problems or avoid them, but I also think he was kind of insane. For one thing, he thought he was swimming in the river, when really he was walking from one pool to another. Also, if his family had so many problems that when he got to his house no one was there, he is clearly disillusioned. The fact that we cannot trust most of the things he thinks makes the story even more impossible to understand.

[ShecarraJ]

Ned is a interesting Character. For some reason when I first read this, I tought he was swimming for something. Maybe to keep him sane, or maybe to find himself. Liquor plays a role in this story. He drinks because it is part of his former high class society. He also drinks to maybe calm him done. Ned is very enigmatic.

[Eliezah D]

I think it's funny that the only people that commented on Robin's post are the people in the group who had to present "The Swimmer." Except for Lucia (it's only because she's the runt of the group because she was gone on Monday).

[tim]

From RogerEbert.com:

(This is an excerpt that discusses details more closely aligned with the actual short story, rather than the movie).

Note that the emphasis Roger Ebert places on referring to Cheever's work as an "epic" and his main character as a "tragic hero," something Robert G. appears to pick up on rather with ease and Elizabeth G. seems to be dismissing because she couldn't verify that in her Cliff Notes for Dummies book.
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"The Swimmer" begins as a perfectly realistic film. But somewhere along the way we realize it is an allegory, and the ending makes that clear. It is also a very stylized film. As the swimmer (Burt Lancaster) pauses beside each pool, his conversations with the owners sound real enough, and yet somehow they are very stiff, very correct, as if everybody were reading lines or this were a dream.

The photography contributes to this feeling. It is beautiful, but not joyful. It has the same nostalgia as "Elvira Madigan" or the snapshots in an old photo album. At every moment, we have the feeling that something tragic has already happened to these people we see smiling. And, of course, something has.

"The Swimmer" is based on a John Cheever story from the New Yorker, and it's the sort of allegory the New Yorker favors. Like assorted characters by John Updike and J.D. Salinger, Cheever's swimmer is a tragic hero disguised as an upper-class suburbanite. There are a lot of tragic heroes hidden in suburbia, I guess, perhaps because so many of them subscribe to the New Yorker. You are what you read.

One interesting thing about "The Swimmer" is that it manages so successfully to reproduce the feeling of a short story in the medium of film. It is a very literary movie, and by that I don't mean the characters stand around talking to each other a lot. The film episodes are put together in a rather formal way, like a well-made short story, and there is none of the fluid movement between scenes that you usually expect in movies.

The movement of the film is from morning to dusk, from sunshine to rain, from youth to age and from fantasy to truth. It would also appear that the swimmer's experiences are not meant to represent a single day, but a man's life.

What we really have here, then, is a sophisticated retelling of the oldest literary form of all: the epic. A hero sets off on a journey. He has many strange adventures along the way, during which he learns the tragic nature of life. At last he arrives at his goal, older and wiser and with many a tale to tell. The journey Cheever's swimmer makes has been made before in other times and lands by Ulysses, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Augie March.