The Stories of John Cheever Literary Elements

Mainstream (non-genre) short stories

For the most part, Cheever’s stories are set in American suburbia during the middle of the 20th century

Most of Cheever’s stories are narrated from a third-person perspective with a shifting point of view. The narrator often is slightly conversational with a subtle ironic commentary occasionally seeping in.

Cheever is unusually successful at writing stories that seem to have no distinct tone and appear to be some of the most objective writing of the 20th century. This atonal quality is almost always juxtaposed against a very distinctly outlined mood that varies not just from story to story, but often within the story itself. An excellent example is “The Five-Forty-Eight” where the mood is almost continually making drastic emotional shifts even as the tone of the story never diverges at all.

Various. “The Five-Forty-Eight” features arguably the most memorable and notable showdown between a starkly drawn protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist is Miss Dent and Mr. Blake is the antagonist who is her former boss and one-night-stand lover who both fired and jilted her leading her to tense stalking and abduction at gunpoint on a commuter train in an attempt to teach him a little something about being human.

Various. The most memorable—and anthologized—major conflict in the short stories of John Cheever is almost certainly that of Neddy Merrill, the title character in “The Swimmer.” What makes is so memorable is that the conflict exists entirely within Neddy himself as “swims home” jumping from one in-ground suburban backyard pool to another as the past and present mingle and mix to force the self-styled king of suburbia to confront the fact that he has not just been dethroned, but is increasingly viewed as the jester.

The climax in a Cheever story is characteristically anti-climactic. Part of the overall ironic structure of his storytelling mandates this quality to a certain extent, but the reality is that Cheever does not really write stories where plot is the most important aspect. Even “The Five-Forty-Eight” which is very much plot-driven ends more ambiguously than most readers would likely desire. One of the few stories in this collection that features an actual climax—a positive, audience-pleasing climax—is the revelation that Deborah, the little girl gone missing in “The Sutton Place Story” is discovered very much alive, happy and unharmed.

One of the rare first-person narratives is that of the son describing the titular “Reunion” with his father. The young man does not yet now why his mother left his father when they enter a restaurant and the father begins drinking and getting increasingly boisterous. This behavior foreshadows to the reader what it will still take a little longer for the son to grasp: his mother made the decision to leave her husband because he is an alcoholic.

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“The Swimmer” is equipped with “only maps and charts” that are “remembered or imaginary” as he indulges in his epic plan to swim his way home through the pools of the neighborhood in an exercise which instills in him the feeling of being “a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny.” It is Neddy’s plan not just to swim his way home, but to regain his youth and make a stand that he is still king of suburbia. This makes the story a strong allusion to Ponce de Leon and his search for the legendary Fountain of Youth which, of course, he fails to locate

Many of the characters that populate Cheever’s stories commute to their jobs in New York City from a suburban town called Shady Hill. The imagery of the name is often implicated in the behavior of the characters who engage in shady shenanigans while comfortably viewing themselves as socially superior (on a higher plane) than many of those with whom they are forced to deal.

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When the dark secrets of Irene Westcott are finally broadcast—not by “The Enormous Radio” but by her husband—he does so using an example of parallel structuring. “Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What's turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother's jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her-not even when she needed it. You made Grace Howland's life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist?”

“And when your shows open up on Broadway with a high class production” in which “Broadway” is a metonym for the American theater.

The title device in “The Enormous Radio” is personified almost from its very introduction into the story. “Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that the new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder.”