Text: "The Swimmer" by John Cheever (2043)
"Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor (2211)
First off I would like to say that I found it very difficult to get into these two stories. At first, I thought they were quite boring, it wasn't until I found my way towards the end of the two stories that I actually began to get into them. Then once I had finished them I was left with no sense of resolution really, they just sort of ended and that frustrated me. But moving on to the assignment....
It seems to me that both stories, "The Swimmer" and "Good Country People" had various similarities and differences. "The Swimmer" started off really slow and I thought the main character, Neddy Merrill, was definitely crazy. "The Swimmer" was told from the view point of Ned and the reader only gets to see inside the head of him. No other characters are seen for very long, just long enough for him to swim through their pool actually. So there isn't a lot of characterization in terms of the other characters. Through Ned's journey to achieve his goal of swimming in all the pools in the county, the reader learns a lot about him. Things seem to happen very quickly within this story, however until the reader begins putting pieces of the puzzle together and starts seeing what's really going on it seems to be a pointless narrative. In the end the reader is left with the moral lesson, not to forget what's really important to you or else you'll lose it, there's not much less in terms of a resolution.
"Good Country People" seems like it's more like 3 stories rather than just one. Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Hopewell, and Joy all seem to have a different goal with a different story. Throughout the story the reader gets to see what every character is thinking at different points in time. In this story there is a lot more characterization and the reader is able to identify more with the characters as a whole. Overall the reader gets to be much more involved with all the characters of this story. At times things got to be a little bit confusing because of how often you had to switch between different character's thoughts so that made the flow of the story a little bumpy, this is probably the result of having more like three stories condensed into one. So there's really no distinct "flow" to the story, but the characters are much more deeply defined.
These two stories do have some similarities. Both seem to have very slow starts to them. The beginnings were somewhat confusing, but once one really got towards the end of the story things began making more sense and got the reader much more engaged. This could be the result of not seeing the point of the stories until the very end. At the beginning of the both works the stories seemed quite pointless then in the end the reader was left with a moral point; however, there still seemed to be no resolution, the reader was more or less just left hanging to figure out what happened to the characters on his/her own. Another similarity that I found was the fact that both endings were quite shocking. It was almost impossible to predict how they were going to end and then once you got the end you were amazed at that's how it all ended.
I must confess, I found it difficult to get through these to works and I didn't really enjoy them. Once I finally got into the story I was disappointed my the ending.
1 comment:
I definitely agree that both works were hard to get into. They both seem like the kind you have to read a few times over before beginning to understand. I like your observation that "Good Country People" is really about three different people, rather than just one. I can really see the different storylines now that I think about it.
I also agree that there is no real resolution at the end of either story. I found this really frustrating but not suprising. Especially in "The Swimmer," the whole story is told from an obscure point of view so it only fits that the end should be obscure as well.
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