This study will provide a comparative analysis of one short story, John Cheever's "The Swimmer," and two non-fiction pieces, "An Inquiry Into Value," an excerpt from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Lewis Thomas' essay "On Cloning A Human Being." The thesis of the study is that the three pieces are all essentially concerned with the special, unique factors that go into making a human being an individual. Each of the three authors are at best only partially successful in describing those factors or that individual.
Cheever's story is about an aging alcoholic who may be in the midst of a nervous breakdown fed by the breakup of his marriage and family. Although we don't hear about this breakup until the end of the story, we do have a hint or two before then. In retrospect, this fact changes the entire story and everything it is saying about Neddy as a man trying to retain his individuality. What seems at first to be an amusing and impetuous whim to "reach his home by water" (Cheever 438), by swimming pool-by-pool across the county, turns out to be a sign of what may be the onset of madness.
For Neddy, being an individual means staying in shape, slender and tanned, exercising his body, drinking great quantities of alcohol, having a mistress, taking pride in his home, house and family. However, his life is falling apart, and what once gave him a sense of individuality now is revealed as empty, shallow and meaningless. He is a self-deluded man who has kept the truth from himself for as long as he could, but now the game is up.
Cheever gives us suggestions that he is truly out of touch with reality and has been so for quite a while. He returns to his home after his swim across the county and finds the house empty---not just of people but of everything. It is unlikely that his wife and daughters moved out in the time it took him to swim the county, so we must assume they have been gone for some ti...