SOURCE: Bell, Loren C. “‘The Swimmer’: A Midsummer's Nightmare.” Studies in Short Fiction 24, no. 4 (fall 1987): 433-36.

In the following essay, Bell compares “The Swimmer” to Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream, focusing on motifs of dreams and nightmares.

The opening paragraph of John Cheever's “The Swimmer” establishes the common malady lingering poolside at the Westerhazys' that midsummer Sunday. “We all drank too much,” said Lucinda Merrill. While the others talk about their hangovers, Neddy Merrill sits “by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin.” Apparently instead of talking, Neddy “had been swimming and now he was breathing deeply, stertorously as if he could gulp into his lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of his pleasure.”¹ Debilitated by his hangover and his swim, warmed by the hot sun and cold gin, his deep breathing resonant with heavy...