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.
Lesson #3 for John Cheever: “The Country Husband” (324): The Man-Child
Part One. Reading Questions
1. What is the significance of Francis’ brush with death? 325, 326. Irrelevance. Such a trauma causes us to question the meaning of our lives.
2. What is the contradiction of Francis Weed’s name? The exquisite and the refined mated with the wild and the untamed. A major theme.
3. How has Francis created a suburban Eden on page 326 and 327?
4. How does the story set up the conflict between the Cave and the Beehive? 327. The need for balance. The back garden is Francis’ cave, a refuge from the beehive, 328.
5. Why does the story contain war references and imagery throughout? 326, Battle of Marne; 327, Scottish chieftains; analogous of interior battle, conflict; 328, domestic battle; 330, the maid from Normandy; 336, Hannibal crossing the Alps; war represents vitality, strength and power; the battle of desire; the war within. What war? Public duty and private desire. Moving through Jung’s 4 stages of life: athlete, warrior, statesman, spirit; Francis stuck at the warrior stage, the egotism stage.
6. What suggests that Francis is being eaten by the worm of self-pity? 327, 328. Attention, relevance.
7. How is Jupiter the ghost of Francis? 329. Self-pity, instincts, out of place, misfit. Another ghost of Francis: Gertrude on page 335 bottom.
8. What does the maid’s ostracism described on page 330 say about the story’s theme? There are penalties and punishments for not conforming to social norms.
9. How does Francis react to the young woman described on page 331 and 332. He becomes intoxicated with a chimera like Lester in American Beauty. On page 333, he dreams of living with the girl Anne Murchison in Paris.
10. Why is Francis’ rudeness towards Mrs. Wrightson a turning point in the story? Why is he so visceral in his hostility toward her on page 334? What will the consequences of his trespass be? They will be ostracized from the socialites like the maid was ostracized in France. Made into misfits because of Francis’ improprieties.
11. When Julia rebukes her husband and says he “can’t live like a bear in a cave,” how do her words sum up the nature of most marriages? 340. Men are happier in marriage; women are not because they mother their husbands. Ouch.
12. What is Francis’ real war on page 341? His subconscious passive-aggressive hostility.
13. What is Francis’ hope on top of page 344?
14. How does Francis tame the beast within? Sublimation. See page 345.
15. Why is the final paragraph hopeful?
Part Two. Man-Child (Peter Pan Syndrome)
1. succumbs to self-pity; in fact, he spends time coddling and nurturing his self-pity.
2. marriage with wife is like a relationship with a mother and child
3. father never outgrows the habits of selfishness and self-centeredness
4. husband never tames his beast or Id; maturity is largely defined by self-control, a quality lacking in Francis Weed
5. The man-child retreats into the ego and severs ties with the community, becoming in essence a pariah or misfit.
6. He is the Eternal Boy who resents having boundaries in his life. Boundaries are essential for growing up, a moral lesson found in the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
7. The Man-Child sees himself as a victim of unfair persecution and as a result goes through life with a chip on his shoulder and resentment.
8. The Man-Child wants to be the center of attention or else he feels sorry for himself.
9. The Man-Child wants his family to love him and dote on him even though he does nothing to show his love for them. He fails to understand the social contract of reciprocity because he is essentially a narcissist.
10. The Man-Child is an "unfocused rebel," as we read in Karen Bernardo's essay.
Part Three. Journal Entry:
First Option: Write about a father you know who struggles with his own internal war and the sublimation strategies he depends on to behave in a tame, civil manner.
Or
Second Option: Write about a man-child, a physical adult who suffers from Peter Pan Syndrome and use this profile to compare to Francis Weed.
Second Single-Story Essay Option:
Compare a man-child to the immature characteristics of Francis Weed
In your first paragraph define the man-child. Then your thesis is Person X and Francis Weed embody the man-child evidenced by ________________, ______________, _____________, ______________, and __________________.
Single-Story Essay Option #3:
Compare a couple you know whose dysfunctional marriage parallels that of Will and Maria from "Just Tell Me Who It Was." Consider jealousy, control, buying off a partner with things to assuage that partner's unhappiness, and the disparity of income and power that existed before the marriage.
Single-Story Essay Option #4:
Describe a "Black Widow Relationship" in which the woman is a sort of drug who creates a velvet trap, luring her victim into a false sense of security that results in warped time, intoxication, grandiosity, and The Point of No Return (death." Compare this process to what happens to Jack Lorey at the hands of Joan Harris in "Torch Song."
Comments