Wednesday, September 9, 2015

The Swimmer: Repressing Problems

The Swimmer reminded me a lot of how humanity tries to repress bad things when they happen, and chooses to run away from problems and not face them head on. In the story, Ned takes on what is seemingly a cathartic journey through a four mile swim in each of the pools in his suburban county, only later does the reader find out that Ned is actually trying to somewhat "drown" his pain away. As Ned swims through the last pools, he is unable to stem the memories of his financial and family disasters any longer, and finally faces them head on at the end when he arrives at his empty house. I found parallels to this in real life when we try to turn away from something that we know is inherently bad or that we have caused by trying to convince ourselves that it is not, and not realizing the significance of the problem until it is too late (eg. environmental pollution, the migrant crisis, sexual assault on college campuses).

 I think another key component of the story is also seeing how and why the problem that Ned has arose. Ned lives in a shallow and superficial wealthy life without seeing the fragility of it from the outside, or the fact that most of his intrinsic problems that he has are caused by this lifestyle he lives or once lived. This concept is equally important to apply outside of fiction as well to realize the problems we have are ones we created for ourselves.

1 comment:

  1. I though that this story was a fantastic representation of the degree to which we run away from our problems. It is a big problem, because it is so much easier to just pretend something isn't there and ignore it than to fix it. You do a great job stating this in your post, and I especially liked your choice of the phrase "drown his pain away".

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