SUPER FUN BLOG

The Swimmer

"What do you want?" she asked.
"I'm swimming across the county."
"Good Christ, will you ever grow up?"
"What's the matter?"
"If you've come here for money," she said, "I won't give you another cent."
"You could give me a drink."
"I could but I won't. I'm not alone."
"Well, I'm on my way."

The interesting thing about this quote was that the swimmer seemed to be in a bit of a daze, unaware of the contextual awkwardness of the situation, while his perfectly sane ex-mistress becomes irritable and cautious. She believes he is there for no good reason, and swimming across the county is a lie. I believe that the swimmer is the occasional mold-breaker of the 1950's. Every once in a while, someone breaks out of the mold, but in doing so goes a bit nuts in the head. Those are all the individualists and counter-cultural figures that came about in the 50's. They do things we consider insane for reasons we either cannot grasp or reasons we feel are trivial and unimportant in our lives.

The Persistence of Desire

"Poor Janet, Clyde felt; except for the interval of himself--his splendid, perishable self--she would never see the light."

This quote is filled with irony. Here is a man, deluded with visions of how great he is, feeling sorry for a woman whom he thinks can't see how insanely awesome and manly he is. The only time he thinks her existence is complete is when she is in a relationship with him. The irony is that she probably feels sorry for him, because he cannot see how much of a shallow and dumb human being he is.

"The poor devil, he had all those letters memorized, all that gibberish--abruptly, Clyde wanted to love him."

I picked this quote because it just jumped out of the blue. I don't know if the author was trying to screw with my mind or what, but all of sudden this man wants to love another man because the latter has memorized the letters on eye charts. I can't even find any symbols or connections in it, it's almost as if it was a prank played by the editor.

Are The Actual Miles?

"For a while they didn't know what to do with the money. Then they put a thousand on the convertible and doubled and tripled the payments until in a year they had it paid."

More irony in this quote. Here, they don't know what to do with a sudden income of money, so out of sheer impulse they bought an expensive convertible for themselves. A few years later, everything has fallen apart, and the money used on the convertible should have been in the bank, safe and sound. Unfortunately, this isn't the case, so in a last ditch attempt to avoid bankruptcy, they need to sell the car. In a way, the moral of the events leading up to this story, and maybe even the whole story itself, is to not go for impulse buys. The back-story in this short story isn't explicitly stated, and the reader has to connect the dots, which I find is kind of unusual for books.

"Things are going to be different!" he calls to her as she reaches the driveway. "We start over Monday. I mean it."

This is a promise he can't keep, but he doesn't know it. I think he's only trying to reassure himself that he still has time to start over, that he still has time to forget everything that happened prior to the coming Monday. But Monday will come, and he will try to start over, only to find that the consequences have shattered his resolve. He's bankrupt and going batty, and he knows it in the corner of his mind. He'll deny it and try to repress it as long as he can, but it'll haunt him and bite him in the ass for the rest of his life.