The Swimmer

Water is one of many visual images that John Cheever utilizes throughout “The Swimmer” to show Neddy Merrill’s descent into disconnection and dissociation from reality. The changing color of the water mirrors his changing emotions and reflects his status in his journey. When the story begins, Neddy is sitting at the edge of the Westerhazys’ “pale […] green” pool. When he approaches the Bunkers’, the water has turned “sapphire-colored.” Once he reaches the Recreation Center pool, the water, tainted by the existence of other individuals, turns into “murk.” The Hallorans’ pool was “opaque gold,” a more natural color to match the Hallorans’ preference to swim in the nude. Later, Neddy describes this water as “dark” and “depressing.” Once he reaches the Biswangers’, the sun has set, and their pool has “a wintry gleam” (Paragraph 33). This continuous sequence is seemingly broken by Neddy’s description of Shirley Adams’s pool, which he sees as “lighted” and “cerulean” (Paragraph 38). The sun has now set and, presumably, Shirley’s pool has underwater lights to make the water glow in the darkness.

Cheever also uses the motif of water to comment on the relationship between Neddy and his neighbors throughout “The Swimmer,” particularly through auditory imagery. At the Bunkers’, the water “refract[s] the sound of voices […] and seem[s] to suspend it in midair” (Paragraph 7). When he leaves the pool, he hears “the brilliant, watery sounds of voices fade” (Paragraph 7). Cheever’s use of the words “suspend” and “brilliant” connotes a sense of otherworldliness, as though the voices (and the characters that they belong to) are mere apparitions. When it begins to storm, Neddy remarks on the “watery notes” and the joy they bring him. Likening the thunderstorm to music reaffirms Neddy’s childlike wonder, and it is telling that he finds the thunderstorm more easily beautiful than the voices of his so-called friends. At the Recreation Center, the “illusion of brilliance and suspense” remained in the public pool—note the addition of the word “suspense,” foreshadowing the dark turn into the surreal—but now Neddy finds them “louder, harsher, and more shrill” (Paragraph 13). Faced with a large swath of people, Neddy is overwhelmed at the sound of the voices and how the water reflects and echoes them.

While Cheever never explicitly uses the word “echo” in relation to Neddy’s experience of the voices in relation to the water, this could be an additional nod to the Narcissus story; the nymph whom Narcissus rebuffs in the myth, who then curses him to a lifetime of unrequited love, is named Echo. Her godly punishment, separate from the story of Narcissus, is that she is only permitted to speak by repeating words back that are said to her.