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This essay explores the issue of masculinity in John Cheever’s somewhat critically overlooked novel, Bullet Park (1969), so as to call attention to the inevitable conflict between the conformist ideologies of the postwar corporate world and the dormant desires of the atomized male suburbanite. By way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous sociological and psychological theory, this essay foreparts the dysfunctional dimensions of masculine dejection as being derivative of suburbia’s larger malady, which is rooted in the very impossibility of the imaginative “apple pie order” it represents. A detailed interpretation of Cheever’s use of the doppelganger narrative will moreover allow for an assessment of the dislocation at the heart of the postwar suburban experience. Bullet Park may be read this way as not only critiquing the prevailing cultural view of suburbia as a pillar of postwar American security, stability, and social adjustment through its portrayal of a disturbing reality of insecurity, instability and maladjustment, but also as directly addressing the fractured principles of America’s traditional values and beliefs. Considering this late sixties text by Cheever as such, this essay hence works to highlight in what ways, and to what extent, the author’s portrayal of a disenchanted suburban ennui in Bullet Park treads the fault lines of laissez-faire capitalism, whilst furthermore succeeding in uncovering the sources of masculine dissatisfaction in their more true and underground origins.

Readers of John Cheever's stories, most of which appeared in the New Yorker before being collected in a Pulitzer-winning book in 1978, regarded the author as \"the Ovid of Ossining,\" the artist who showed the riches and wonders of suburban life. (\"Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.\") Time and again, we find him seeking consolation at his village's Episcopal church, moved by the sight of the Eucharist, consoled by the words of the Creed.

Questioned at the time of the play's transfer to Broadway about the title of Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), Terrence McNally explained that he found the phrase, complete with exclamation points, in an entry in John Cheever's journals. The passage indeed appears in The Journals of John Cheever, which McNally recalls reading not long after they were published in 1991. In the passage, which possibly records a dream, Cheever says that while \"walking in the woods, he heard a man shouting, 'Love! Valor! Compassion!' he followed the voice until he saw him. He was standing on a rock shouting the names of virtues to no one. He must have been mad. Thus, the exclamation was not delivered as a sigh, as McNally supposes, but, rather, as what Cheever calls elsewhere an incantation -- that is, as a way for the speaker verbally to will himself to incarnate the virtues in question, or pseudo-magically to conjure their existence in the world where they are sorely needed.

The aim of the article is to explore the pursuit of eternal youth as depicted in John Cheever’s selected fictions. Cheever’s “O Youth and Beauty!” and “The Swimmer” feature middle-aged and middle-class protagonists living in the American suburbs. Tormented by a longing for their lost youth, attractiveness, fitness, joie de vivre and something more elusive they cannot identify, Cheever’s characters embark on grotesque and hyperbolic as well as desperate and inevitably futile attempts to tame time by achieving backbreaking athletic feats. In doing so, they exemplify the Dorian Gray syndrome, immaturity and narcissism. Importantly, they also reveal their existential drama, at once modern and ageless. In my essay, I propose to close-read the two stories in light of the theories of DSG and thought surrounding the contemporary anti-aging movement, with particular focus on the concept of successful aging. My argument is that the characters’ obsession with remaining—preferably forever—young, keeping their good looks and staying fit pushes them toward objectification, self-objectification and a path of self-destruction, and inscribes itself in the capitalist and individualist paradigm.

This article tackles the manifestations of American literary themes in Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. I contend that the transmedial alignment of TV series and literature heightens our understanding of fundamental myths of American exceptionalism. This paper studies the role of language at script level as a site or topos where the protagonist's constant reinvention occurs. Moreover, it provides an interdiscursive analysis of Frank O'Hara's \"Mayakovsky\" and John Cheever's \"The Swimmer\" to show their thematic connection, which is the transition from old to new life. This theme possesses an axiomatic role in the genesis of this show, suggesting a tight intermedial relationship between the show's scripts and the two literary works I will analyze. On the basi s of my analysis, I suggest that reading this TV series as literature is possible if we consider both the show's thematic connection with American literary themes and its multiple literary references.

Rather, it's the revelation of his delayed Yale graduation after Fenton-then a young faculty member beginning his research for The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway-caught him turning in a class term paper as his senior honors thesis. Scott's visit to Fenton's Connecticut home in August 1950 served two purposes: he clarified the work needed to transform his Hemingway paper into an honors thesis, and meeting Fenton's family, Scott also got a glimpse of how university professors lived. In 1969, Columbia University Press published his revised dissertation as The Suburban Myth, and he became an associate professor. While he was completing a superb thematic biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald-the book he famously titled Fool for Love-Scott's second marriage ended.

This study discusses the absurdity of Coverly Wapshot, the main character, in John Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle. Theoretical ideas regarding absurdity proposed by philosophers such as Albert Camus and John Sutherland are employed. The objectives of the study are to demonstrate the absurdity of Coverly and to reveal the causes that drove him to perform the absurd actions. The study found that his absurdity was seen through his parents’ absurd stories. The chain of events, ranging from the family arguments to separation and running away from home, affected the absurd. In New York, the sudden cause of the absurdity is the anxiety caused by the lack of money, including becoming lonely and losing a job. The study argues that absurdity can be found when ill-prepared humans are trapped in the world that is modernized.

At home in the evenings, he is distant; he drinks too much; he looks off aimlessly as he performs rote physical activities like drying the dishes; or, he stares at the television screen in the dark after he has shooed his children off to sleep. Commuter trains, known familiarly only by their departure times (e.g. the 8:26, the 5:48, the 7:14, the 12:05, etc.), provided spaces for writers to reveal the innerworkings of their characters and/or serve as symbols/images of postwar American life. The \"train,\" this paper will illustrate, meant different things to different Americans and those disparities say much about a citizenry still recoiling from the brutalities of the Second World War; that was timorous over war on the Korean Peninsula; and, growing increasingly anxious about containing the creeping threat of Communism. Regarding both the novel and film versions, critics focus on Tom Rath's journey toward reintegration where he is \"rescued-re-civilized so to speak-by the imposed constraint of domestic life\" as indicated by his supposed \"revitalized marriage\" and life with Betsy (O'Brien 67).