The Theme Of The Desperation In Literature - Essay Example

The Swimmer” & “Shiloh” The common theme that runs in both stories is: A pretty façade disguising a life of quiet desperation. “The Swimmer” takes place in the affluent suburbs of Westchester County, New York and focuses on Neddy Merill, who, no longer a young man, wants to retain his youth and believes that he is a vibrant individual. In an attempt to blaze new trials, he decides to find a new way home by literally swimming home through a chain of private swimming pools in his affluent community. However, as he progresses from pool to pool he seems to age and even the weather seems to reflect this (Neddy notices that some of the tree leaves are already yellow: being midsummer, he tells himself, “they must be blighted.”) Neddy’s optimism and satisfaction with life gradually fades away and is replaced by imitations that he may be blocking out his actual situation, that his life may in fact be not so rosy as he portrays it to be. The climax occurs when he finally arrives at his own house, where he finds: “The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’ for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else?….The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the window, saw that the place was empty.” Neddy’s journey through the swimming pools t an empty house is meant to symbolize his entire life, and his earlier optimism is designed to show his self delusion; at the heart of it all lies the message that things are not as they seem to be in this happy, upper middle class burgh; lurking just beneath the polished surface is the looming specter of financial and emotional ruin. John Cheever once stated that this story was originally meant to be a part of a novel, and was later shortened down from over 150 pages of manuscript. He also stated that he originally intended to write a story that paralleled the story of Narcissus, a character in Greek mythology who died while staring at his reflection in a pool. Cheever did maintain this central idea of Narcissus in his story “The Swimmer” substituting one pool of water with several swimming pools, as ultimately Neddy realizes the true meaning of his life when he progresses through different pools and sees life stories of realistic nature unfold before his eyes until he reaches his empty house. Bobby Ann Mason treats the theme “a pretty façade disguising a life of quiet desperation” differently in “Shiloh”. Set in a small town in western Kentucky south of Paducah (not far from the Kentucky lake), “Shiloh” is the story of a disabled truck driver Leroy Moffit and his wife Norma Jean. The changes in their life are brought about by the fact that the present has effectively displaced, transformed and re-shaped the traditional. The changes produce confusion, ennui and alienation; changes that are paradigmatic of the contemporary South, and to an extent, of modern America. As a result we see characters like Leroy and Norma Jean suddenly realize that Kentucky life around them has changed while they have gone through life rather blindly. They wonder about the changes (“subdivisions are spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick”, and, “farmers who used to gather around the court house square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers and they have disappeared without his noticing.”) Leroy and Norma Jean become unhappy moderns who do not know exactly what is wrong; they simply feel at loose ends. It is Normal Jean’s mother (Mabel Beasley) catching her smoking after twenty years (it mirrors her inner desperation) that makes her decide to act on the changes that have occurred (“Everything was fine until Mama caught me smoking,” she says. “That really set something off.”). In reality though, while this is the catalyst that jars Norma Jean into action, she must admit: “No, it wasn’t fine. I don’t know what I’m saying.” It mirrors her confusion. Norma Jean starts going to Paducah Community College, stays up late outlining paragraphs and writing compositions, attends body-building classes, and most significantly, realizes that she is living a life of deception; she then arrives at the conclusion that she wants to leave her husband Leroy. It is ironic, fitting and symbolic that it is at Shiloh that Norma Jeans tells Leroy that she wants to leave him. Character analysis At the beginning of “The Swimmer”, Neddy Merill is at a cocktail party at the Westerhazy’s on a pleasant midsummer afternoon. He is portrayed as virtually a youth (“He was a slender man – he seemed to have the special slenderness of youth.”) He has a drink in one hand and is dangling his other hand in their backyard swimming pool. Pools are commonplace in his affluent community. In fact, Neddy thinks that pools are so common in his neighborhood that he can easily make the eight-mile journey home by swimming. This first scene is followed by a succession of scenes where Neddy slowly, and with increasing surety begins to realize that all is not well with the people in his community – the people and their houses and their lifestyles do not in fact reflect the calm, cool, affluent façade they would like to portray. One by one the pretty outer pictures of his neighbors are stripped bare to reveal the actual secrets lurking beneath that show a different picture altogether. Shirley Adams is Neddy’s former mistress. When Neddy arrives at her home, she is with a younger man. Shirley is not pleased to see her former lover. In fact she is shocked by his presence and hastily warns him that she won’t “give him another cent”. This indicates that she has no fond memories of their former relationship, and that Neddy, for all his supposed affluent façade, is in fact in a lot of debt and has been for some time, as Shirley’s words indicate he has been borrowing from her in the past – since they were lovers. Neddy is terribly upset to find out that the Welchers’ pool was dry; in fact their home was up for sale. He recognizes that his memory must be failing him or he is repressing unpleasant facts for not remembering what had happened to the Welchers. Grace Biswanger, who in the past used to regularly invite Neddy and his wife to her parties, rudely turns him away when he visits her house. She calls him an uninvited gatecrasher and snidely confides to her guests that Neddy is broke and has attempted to borrow money from her and her husband. Even the Biswangers’ barman has the effrontery to treat Neddy with disrespect. This scene shows the fragile nature of friendship that is based on affluence; once the veil of affluence is torn, rejection follows swiftly and mercilessly. It also once more points out to Neddy living much beyond his means, trying to put up an affluent front while borrowing money from others to maintain his image. At the Saches’, Neddy asks for a drink but Helen Sachs primly tells him they stopped keeping alcohol in the house since her husband Eric had undergone a massive heart surgery three years ago – something that Neddy has no memory of. Her excuse is seen as a brush-off to a visitor who is considered no longer worthy of getting a welcome to their house. All these experiences of Neddy lead us to the conclusion that the lives of Neddy and his neighbors try to portray something while actually it is something vastly different. At the very end, Neddy arrives at his house and finds it empty. In his previous conversation with the Halloranns’, we infer that Neddy has suffered some sort of misfortune and has had to sell his house. He had been repressing his decline in financial and social status so deeply that he forgot he had moved somewhere else. In “Shiloh” as it is with most stories, it takes a traumatic event of some nature to make the characters see that the environment has changed and they no longer know who they are; the bubble that had been their life so far has suddenly burst, throwing them out into the unknown. In Leroy Moffit’s case, it is his accident and injury that opens his eyes to the change not only in his own life, but also in the life of his wife Norma Jean (“In all the years he was on the road he never took time to examine anything. He was always flying past scenery.”) Leroy reacts to the changes in his life by trying to go back. He thinks he can hold on to this wife if he can go back to a simpler time. He decides to do this by erecting a log cabin; he goes so far as to order the blueprints and to build a miniature out of Lincoln logs. Mabel, Norma Jean’s mother, is convinced that if Leroy and Norma Jean go to Shiloh on a second honeymoon, they can somehow save their fifteen-year marriage and start a new life. Leroy, who is endeared to us due to his attempts to deal with the problems brought on by the changes in Norma Jean, agrees with his mother-in-law, saying to Norma Jean: “You and me could start all over again. Right back at the beginning.”) At Shiloh however, Norma Jean reveals that she cannot continue and wants to leave Leroy. By the end of the story, Leroy knows that he cannot go back as “it occurs to him that building a house of logs is…empty – too simple….Now he sees that building a log house is the dumbest idea he could have had…..It was a crazy idea.” In the final analysis, Leroy tries to deal with the changes, not fight them. He thinks to himself that “he’ll have to think of something else, quickly. He will was the blueprints into tight balls and fling them into the lake…Then he’ll get moving again.” Despite the fact that Norma Jean has moved away from him and is “walking through the cemetery, following a serpentine brick path”, Leroy “tries to hobble toward her.” References used: Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York. Vintage. May 2000. Mason, Bobby Ann. Shiloh and Other Stories. New York. Harper & Row, 1983. . Read More