Tyler Cheever

¶ … Limiting as Well as the Creative Capacity of Mental Illness in Literature Anne Tyler's the Accidental Tourist and John Cheever's "The Swimmer" Mental illness in many works of fictional and non-fictional literature is often portrayed as a kind of wellspring of creativity for the sufferer of the illness. However, even in many works of literature, mental illness is also shown as potentially crippling to the sufferer and those whom are close to the sufferer.

This eviscerating honesty is seen in Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist as well as depiction of the central character of John Cheever's "The Swimmer." Both illustrate this principle that mental illness is an illness, not a 'gift' as it is sentimentally portrayed. Rather than experiencing glorious and creative highs of mania, or experiencing a form suffering that gives the soul an additional insight into the human condition, both Tyler's and Cheever's protagonists' life experiences are ultimately limited by their mental illnesses.

Anne Tyler shows how obsessive-compulsive disorder has limited the variety of life experiences her fictional author-traveler is capable of, while Cheever makes similar uses of the symptoms of the last stages of alcoholism to develop the character of the swimmer Neddy Merrill. Anne Tyler's protagonist in The Accidental Tourist lives in a world of Macon's own creation. He is not explicitly delusional, true. But to cope with life's problems, he obeys a rigid code of behavior.

Even when traveling, he makes a commitment to obeying the rules of his daily home life. In fact, he has made a career out of this rigidity, writing travel books for businesspeople who hate to travel and who wish to take in as little new experience in the different countries they travel to as possible, who wish to create their own little worlds wherever they go. The notion of accidental traveling implies an unwillingness to depart from one's personal home regime.

Macon Leary even includes sections in his books that help people avoid contact with others, such as always bringing a book, wherever one is. However, his regime is so personal and so inflexible, he cannot even alter the rhythms of his daily life to mourn, something that causes him to lose his wife as well as lose the ability to come to truly terms with the loss of a loved one and move on, traveling through life into a new and more positive future.

Neddy Merrill strikes the reader at first as more likeable than Macon Leary, and the premise of the short story "The Swimmer," that there are so many swimming pools between Merrill's initial location and his home eight miles away that he can literally swim home, is itself amusing, a testimony to the wealth of the community in which Neddy dwells.

Gradually, however, it becomes clear that far more time is passing than Neddy is completely aware of, much like a drinking man 'blacking out.' The fantastic premise of the story is actually a sad metaphor for how Neddy is drowning in drink. He is really lost in a sea of a very different kind of liquid. Neddy's obliviousness to what is really going on around him becomes a potent parallel for the nature of alcoholism. One pool at a time, at first the alcoholic is unaware how deep.