Short Story: The Swimmer

Summary
Neddy Merrill is introduced as a man admired for his vitality and social ease, who one bright afternoon decides to swim home by following a chain of backyard pools across his suburban county. He christens the route "the Lucinda River" after the neighbor whose pool starts his journey and sets out with an air of improvisational ritual, buoyed by drink, compliment, and the cheerful approval of friends. Early encounters are buoyant: neighbors shout encouragement, parties spill over with laughter, and Neddy's progress has the feel of a triumphal, intimate parade through a gilded landscape.
As he moves from pool to pool, the trip grows stranger and more fraught. Gates are locked, pools are drained, hosts are absent or indifferent, and the weather shifts in ways that suggest more than a single afternoon has passed. Neddy's physical energy flags, memory thins, and the social fabric around him frays into hints of scandal, neglect, and loss. When he finally reaches his own house, he discovers it dark, empty, and barred; no one greets him, and the place that once signified security is inexplicably denied. The narrative closes on Neddy's stunned, sobbing figure on his doorstep, the earlier buoyancy collapsed into bewilderment and humiliation.

Themes and Interpretation
The journey functions as a sustained allegory about time, denial, and the hollowness beneath suburban prosperity. Neddy's chosen mode of travel, cutting through private pools that symbolize leisure and status, becomes a test of continuity between outward appearances and inner reality. His insistence on swimming "home" is less about geography than about a refusal to acknowledge change: aging, loss of reputation, estrangement from family, and the erosion of social ties that once defined him.
Ambiguity is central to the story's power. Temporal dislocations and unreliable perception invite readings that range from literal drunken wandering to a surreal parable of psychological collapse. Neighbors' shifting attitudes suggest the fragility of social credit: laughter and hospitality recede into indifference or hostility as the illusion of Neddy's control dissolves. Themes of masculinity, addiction, and the limits of nostalgia intertwine, so that the final image of a man locked out of his own house reads as both personal tragedy and critique of an American dream that promises stability while masking deterioration.

Style and Legacy
Cheever's prose here oscillates between crystalline realism and lyric metaphor, using precise domestic detail to heighten the surreal, cumulative effect of the journey. Small, telling moments, conversations half-remembered, the shifting light on water, the technicalities of clipped hedges and locked gates, are rendered with a calm, knowing cadence that makes the story's eventual collapse all the more devastating. The narrative voice maintains a deceptively affable tone that lets horror and pathos accumulate without melodrama.
"The Swimmer" remains one of Cheever's most anthologized and debated pieces, admired for its economy and its capacity to disturb. Its open-endedness and symbolic density have invited film adaptation and continual critical reassessment, with readers returning to its final image for its blunt insistence that social brilliance can mask profound loneliness and that denial, when sustained long enough, ends in stark exposure.