The Swimmer Stylistic Analysis

Third-person limited narration and first-person present tense/retrospective narration are two different types of narrations used in literature. These narrations can be seen in Uplike’s “A & P” and Cheever’s “The Swimmer”. “A & P” is about a man named Sammy who works in a grocery store. He notices a group of three girls dressed in bathing suits walk in. As they walk around the store, Sammy cannot stop looking at them. As the story progresses, Lengel, the manager, ends up telling the girls they need to dress decently. Soon after this, Sammy quits his job. On the other hand, “The Swimmer” is about a man named Neddy who decides to swim from the Westerhazys to his own home. Along the way, Neddy’s life seems to accelerate at an unrealistic pace. At the beginning Neddy’s life was perfect, but as he continues …show more content…
“A &P” is firstly presented as a first-person-present tense narration, but it is soon revealed that the narrator is looking back on events happening to him, making it a first-person retrospective narration. Sammy reveals he is looking back on his experience when he says, “Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad, but I don’t think its so sad myself” (157). This is the first and only clue that this story is told after the events have been completed. Since the story is told this way, Sammy the narrator can provide insight or hindsight to what happened to him. However, in “The Swimmer”, this is not the case. Neddy is experiencing his swim as it takes place. He does not have the chance to look back on what was happening to him and provide insight or hindsight. This is seen when Neddy finally arrived at his house after the long swim; “He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty” (737). Clearly Neddy still did not know what was happening to him even when he arrived to his empty