Lesson #2 for Cheever: “Torch Song” (89): Comparing Neddy Merrill and Jack Lorey
Part One. Essay Option Pairing “The Swimmer” and “Torch Song”
Write a comparative analysis of two paired stories focused on one of these themes: The grandiosity of self resulting in solipsism, warped time, and consummation in “The Swimmer” and “Torch Song.”
Your 4-page literary analysis should show an ability to make thematic comparisons, find irony, paradox, symbolism, analogy, and imagery in their function to render the stories’ important themes.
In your final page, your fifth page, you will write a salient, concrete profile of someone you know who embodies the characteristics you just described in your literary comparison.
You will need a Works Cited page that cites Cheever, my blog, any interviews you might do with your subjects, and any other source material. Remember: Give your essay a catchy, salient, memorable title.
Part Two. Points of Comparison for Your Essay’s Mapping Components
One. Grandiosity
Two. Solipsism
Three. Warped Time (losing your sense of time)
Four. Consummation (being consumed by your obsession)
Three. Grandiosity in Neddy Merrill and Jack Lorey
Grandiosity compels Merrill and Lorey to withdraw into egotistical fantasies rather than make meaningful connections with people.
The energy required to inflate the ego excludes the energy and interest required for nurturing human relationships. We all have to make a choice: Do we want to inflate our ego (self-aggrandizement) or foster healthy relationships? Choose the ego, and you’ll live a life of isolation and loneliness, squandering your life and time on egotistical, childish fantasies. This is the choice made by both Lorey and Merrill.
Both Merrill and Lorey are alcoholics. It seems alcohol isolates people and medicates them from the hell that results from intractable loneliness.
We can add that Joan Harris is a metaphor for alcohol. She drugs and medicates her half-crippled moribund boyfriends with liquor.
Four. Solipsism
Both Merrill and Lorey withdraw into the self and are blind to the truth about themselves. The more we withdraw into the self, the more we lose our perspective on the big picture and the more we lose our grasp of “the situation.” Merrill doesn’t see that he’s lost his family, his job, his friends, and his house as he goes on a swim quest to be greeted with celebration by his wife and daughters. Instead he finds an empty boarded-up house.
Lorey doesn’t know his “situation” either. He keeps divorcing and escaping meaningful relationships with women and going back to his “Rebound Lady,” Joan Harris. Joan is always there for him. She accepts him as an alcoholic, a man who doesn’t want to be engaged with women. He can’t see that Joan is NOT an accepting, loving woman but the EMBODIMENT OF DEATH, come to cradle him into her death bosom. In modern psychology, people like Joan Harris are called enablers.
Five. Warped Time.
Both Merrill and Lorey are waiting for grand moments that never come. And while waiting, life is passing them by. They are like Linus, the kid in the Charlie Brown Halloween special who doesn’t go trick-or-treating with his friends. Instead, he goes into a pumpkin field and waits for the Great Pumpkin to descend from the sky and deliver candy far more glorious than his friends will ever receive. But he waits in vain. Halloween is over and he is empty-handed. The cartoon is a metaphor for those who squander their lives waiting for a grandiosity that never happens.
Six. Consummation.
Your obsession consumes you until you reach a Point of No Return. You only have so much time to exercise your free will and take effective action against your human weaknesses. But if you continue to surrender to grandiosity, alcohol, enablers, the demands of your ego, etc., you will eventually go insane and reach a point in your life where life has passed you by, you’ve lost all your human connections, and all you can do is medicate yourself with alcohol and withdraw into grandiose fantasies as you sink deeper and deeper into the bosom of death.
Both stories share a moral: Wake up from your stupor, see what is happening to you, pour your liquor and your egotistical fantasies down the sink before it’s too late.
Seven. Your essay’s final page:
Profile someone you know who is squandering his or her life on grandiosity, solipsism, warped time, and consummation. Talk about your high school bodybuilding friend who wanted to weigh 300 pounds.
Part Eight. Reading Questions
1. In paragraph 1, how do we establish that Joan is to Jack what alcohol is to Neddy Merrill? He’s fond of death. A symbiosis (give 10 characteristics of symbiosis and solipsism later) between the thing we “love” and its hold on us. In many ways Joan embodies alcohol and intoxication. She’s with a passed-out man on page 90.
2. What evidence is there early on that Jack in unanchored, distracted, anxious? He is a woman-hopper and a dreamer never content with the life he has. Chasing a chimera, he loses time and I’m reminded of the famous line in The Wire about the fleeting moments vs. what your life really is. Make a link to your website.
3. Why does Jack think of Joan as the “Widow”? She turns men into helpless dope fiends like the “Swedish Count” or whatever kind of mountebank he was. But on another level he has blind belief in Joan’s “innocence.” See page 91. One of our flaws is our failure to see the demonic when we erect mythic images of others.
4. How does Joan’s relationship with Hugh Bascomb reinforce her image as the Widow? The “death rattle”; the name Hugh Bascomb rhymes with tomb. His eyes are “inflamed with drink.”
5. What kind of woman is drawn to addicts? In other words, what does such an inclination say about her? See page 92 bottom. She is afraid of a man who has full possession of his senses. She is afraid of a fully-realized man. She wants to control a child because her insecurity compels her to be a dysfunctional mother figure to these drunk men-children. They don’t have to be drunk, just nut-cases, invalids, emotional cripples, nut jobs, abusive men of all types. (like Franz on page 94 or some charlatan who steals her money described on page 97)
6. Why does Jack’s wife divorce him on page 95? It’s implied that he’s an alcoholic. His obsession with Joan suggests as such.
7. What does the “torch song” at the bottom of page 95 say about her soul? Inevitably, someone like her never becomes a soulful human; rather, she becomes a cipher as becomes evident on page 98.
8. What do Jack and Joan have in common? See page 96. They both have blinders on. They make a “good” match. They can be mired in each other’s pathology.
9. When might Jack start to see Joan’s “death toll”? See page 98 and 99 top. And see page 99 at the bottom where he recognizes the sickly man as being Joan’s man.
10. What dangerous “hope” is described on the top of page 100 and what does this hope say about the American Dream? Unlimited expectations and a sense of unlimited possibility prevent us from living in the present. We continue to dream into the future even as we waste our lives away. This is one of the story’s major themes.
11. What is so terrifying about Joan’s response to Jack’s rebuke of her existence on page 102?
12. Do you think Jack can save himself from Joan? Explain.
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