Cheever's 'the Swimmer.'

Front 1

'Chekhov of the exurbs'

Back 1

Cheever's characters are middle class, white,living in the fictional suburb of Shady hill. Trapped, sadness and irony.

Front 2

Dreamlike and sympathy.

Back 2

Carried along by 'effortless prose'.

Front 3

Moore

Back 3

Characters as taking on 'fables of heroism'.

Front 4

No politics or ideology in his work-Norton.

Back 4

Is that true though? Can clearly read into the falseness of American suburban life as anti climatic and stagnatory. Derrida, it is the absence of political thought that actually brings it to our attention?

Front 5

From 'The Brigadier and the Golf Widow' (1964)

Back 5

The importance of language and naming to an identity.

Front 6

'I drank too much last night...it must have been the wine.'

Back 6

A sense of the importance of the external. Agency does not exist. People are engaged with the external environment in a visceral way.

Front 7

'He might have been compared to a summer's day'

Back 7

Parody. Disrupts the canon of literature. Physically swims against it?

Front 8

'he was a pilgrim'

Back 8

Again-parody. The importance of journeys. Unlike modernism, the protagonist has no clear sense of observation-instead confused and entangled by his journey/system.

Front 9

'Gone was his navel'

Back 9

The relevance of body and identity, a sense of the transgressive body with a lack personal agency over it's functions/ Bhatkin?

Front 10

' All swimmers must wear their identification disks'

Back 10

This is placed on a sign and eagerly repeated by the lifeguards. The symbolic/power of language is shown to have a real influence over the human psyche. By making a journey through the suburbs, cutting through hedges etc. Cheever's protagonist is creating new micronarratives. (lyotard.)