In the short story, “The Swimmer” by John Cheever, the reader learns about Neddy’s life in his eyes. The reader reads about how Neddy’s life unfolds before his eyes. Neddy leaves a function and decides to swim through the neighbor's pools to get home. Well, on the way he begins to realize that he has lost his life as he knows it. He begins to notice the things that he thought he had but does not anymore. By the end of the story, he comes to see that he was living in his own time. But, also the reader notices that a lot of his problems were self-inflicting. The reader might not understand how they are self-inflicting, however. In “The Swimmer” a theme is alcoholism and all these problems that Neddy starts to realize he has troubled due to this alcoholism.
Swimming, in the real world, is used for: exercise, fun, and entertainment. In “The Swimmer” the action of swimming is used to explain to the audience how deep Neddy is into his own pool of alcohol. Neddy decides to swim his way home and that is a metaphor for swimming deeper into his alcoholism. The more he swims in the story the more he loses and the more he realizes that he has lost a lot. Neddy starts to understand that he let the alcohol change his life. Cheever writes, “Looking overhead he saw the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry”( ). This quotation shows the reader that he realizes that he let alcohol control so much of his life. It explains how Neddy didn’t notice the time was passing him by.
Along with swimming through the pools being a metaphor for the alcohol in the story, there are many things that the characters say that make me believe this as well. Written by Cheever, “It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night’” ( ). This indicates that everyone in the town...