Factors That Create an Individual

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

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omas deal with the issue of what makes a human being a human being, what values give him or her a purpose in or connection with life in general and his or her own individual existence. Cheever shows us a man who has come to the end of his rope because he is no longer able to keep up the lies of which his life was made. The images he has constructed to fabricate a false happiness have crumbled, and he is exposed as a shell of a man. The same suggestion is made by Thomas with respect to the cloned human being. It will not be a true human being, he says, but will be without a soul, without the unique, unpredictable, spontaneous factors which make a human being a human being. Thomas has no more hope that cloning will succeed in manufacturing happiness than Cheever has hope that the materialistic American Dream can create such happiness: And obviously, if the whole thing were done precisely right, they would still be casting about for ways to solve that problem of universal dissatisfaction, and sooner or later they'd surely begin to look around at each other, wondering who should be cloned for his special value to society, to get us out of all this. And so it would go, in regular cycles, perhaps forever (Thomas 388). Pirsig seems to

Category: Literature - F