John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay Example

John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay Example John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay John Cheever and His Seemingly Average Americans Essay Average Americans Since 1935 middle class Americans have been able to sit in their suburban home or their urban apartment, open up a copy of the New Yorker, and read about themselves. Not literally, but rather a perfect reflection of themselves, or their next door neighbor, or their friend down the street. Of John Achievers nearly two hundred short stories, one hundred and twenty one were published in the New Yorker. He wrote primarily about the seemingly average American He takes that stereotype and creates narratives that delve so deeply into he psyches of each of his characters that their ordinary lives become immediately enthralling. He draws universal connections that make his stories instantly relate- able no matter the setting. Achievers work is generally sorted into four categories based on their location and while he manages to paint distinct pictures of the types of people in each environment we see an overarching theme throughout his writing the theme of the duality of man. Each story presents us with a main character, usually an upper-middle class American, battling between the facade they have rated for the outside world and their innermost thoughts and desires a feeling we have all dealt with at one time or another. These characters typically live tranquil lives that become momentarily uprooted which sends each into a state of turmoil, and though we can usually rely on Achiever to return them to normalcy, there is the occasional exception. Each character is treated with such care that even at their times of normalcy we find each one somehow captivating. Achiever creates a dialogue among his vast audience and bridges the gap of social differences by offering moon human conditions manifested within his characters. At the time of Achievers greatest success as a writer suburbia was still a fairly new addition to the American scenery, albeit a significant one, with the majority of Americans leaving the cities for the picturesque notion of quiet suburban living. This is the setting for some of Achievers most successful stories most notably The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and The Country Husband. Achiever has been widely referred to as the chronicler of suburban life, and though his entire body of work does not focus on suburbia, a large oration, and most certainly some of his best does. On this Achiever has said Theres been too much criticism of the middle-class way of life. Life can be as good and rich there as anyplace else. I am not out to be a social critic, however, nor a defender of suburbia. It goes without saying that the people in my stories and the things that happen to them could take place anywhere.. Many of Achievers stories are set in suburbia because it is a setting that lends itself perfectly to the concept of a characters internal struggle vs.. Their external appearance, but we also see this theme manifested elsewhere in other stories such as The Enormous Radio which takes place in a New York apartment building. In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill we meet Johnny Hake. Right away we are given every detail of his life age, height, weight, where he was born, where he grew up, where he was confirmed, etc. Simply put Johnny Hake is your average middle-aged suburban American male, that is until he becomes tired of his work environment and leaves his Job. Johnny rents a cubicle and tries to make a living for himself, but he soon finds that he can not support his family on the amount of money he is able to make. He finds himself desperate when it came time to borrow money he had nowhere to turn.. Having been taught by his mother never to speak about money, he could not bring himself to burden his wife with their financial difficulties. One night Johnny and his wife attend a dinner party at their friends, the Warburton, house. It is there that he learns about the large amount of cash the Carl Warburton tends to carry. That night he feels the desire for money as a premonition of death and explains he had never longed for anyone the way he yearned that night for money. He sneaks away in the middle of the night and enters he Warburton house stealing Carla wallet and returning home. As soon as he is safe in his own house, the weight of what he has Just done bares down on him. Oh, I never knew that a man could be so miserable and that the mind could open up so many chambers and fill them with self-reproach. His misery is unrelenting he makes note of every tiny theft he witnesses or reads about and his eyes twitch when he hears the word steal. He begins to see everyone around him as a thief and searches for someone he can blame. He begins acting unlike himself he is distracted in church and yells at his wife and children. At one point he even describes the types of people he hates and is pained to realize that he is one of them. Despite all of this, it does not stop him from choosing his next victims. However, on his way to steal from the Pewters it begins to rain, and it is this, of all things, that finally sobers him. It is as if is mind had been washed clear. There were ways out of my trouble if I cared to make use of them. I was not trapped. I was here on earth because I chose to be. And it was no skin off my elbow how I had been given the gifts of life so long as I possessed them, and I possessed them then. He the goes home and goes back to sleep. The next day he gets a call asking him to come back to work and that night he goes back to the Warburton and leaves the 900 he had taken. Johnny Hake returns to his normal life, his brief brush with his malevolent destiny soon to be no more than a nightmare. The Country Husband offers us a look inside the life of Francis Weed. At the beginning of the story Francis is on a plane traveling home. Soon there are technical difficulties and after a moment of terror and the mental image of the spreading wings of the Angel of Death the plane needs to make an emergency landing. All Francis wants is to share his experience with his family, but the house is in a state of chaos, and though he tries to tell his tale the children are fighting and his wife is too preoccupied to listen. At this point in the story we can understand Francis strife through the observations he makes of his life around him. Such as the outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity he hears when listening to the neighbors piano playing or how the energetic golden retriever Jupiter is an anomaly and how his high spirits were out of place in Shady Hill.. Soon we see Francis spirits aka a turn for the better when he becomes suddenly infatuated with the beautiful, young, babysitter, Anne Morison. When these new passionate feelings take a hold of him he begins to see life in a new way, observing the beauty around him instead of the drabness. Birds were congressionally and the last of the robins. The sky shone like enamel. Even the smell of ink from his morning paper honed his appetite for life, and the world that was spread out around him was plainly a paradise. Francis, elated, buys his new love a bracelet and he even ends up kissing her, but problems arise when he meets the man that she is engaged to. After a heated argument with his wife, Francis finds himself in a hopeless state. He resolves himself to go see a psychiatrist and his life is returned to normalcy. The story ends on an anticlimactic note with a scene of a typical night in Shady Hill, everything is exactly as it should be. In this way Francis weeds exemplifies the typical Achiever character He is an ordinary middle-class suburban husband and father who experiences a sudden and fierce turn in his emotional state. Instead of changing his life for good he is instead trampled by his social restraints and returns to his average life, his momentary suasion replaced by apathy. Though not set in Shady Hill as the other stories are, The Enormous Radio fits perfectly into the pattern that John Achievers suburban tales follow. This story is instead set in an apartment building and creates the image of dozens of nearly identical rooms and families within, lending a similar feel to the suburbia of the other narrations. Our main characters in this story are Jim and Irene Westport who differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors only in an interest they shared in serious music. Unfortunately, their radio breaks and Jim f forced to buy a new one. However, this new radio is revealed to not play music, but instead the sounds and conversations from the other apartments in the building. Soon listening to the private lives of her neighbors becomes an obsession for Irene. She begins listening to the radio every opportunity she gets, she can not reign in her curiosity and she begins to see her neighbors differently, wondering every time she sees someone who it was who said what. This begins to take a toll on her, she becomes upset over the things she hears but she still can not stop listening, she soon tarts to question her own happiness which before she had taken as absolute truth. She turns to her husband for reassurance Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But weve never been like that, have we, darling Have we I mean, weve always been good and decent and loving to one another, havent we And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives arent sordid, are they, darling Are they She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. Were happy, arent we, darling We are happy, arent we. As desperately as she tries to confirm their perfect allegations the illusion is shattered when, towards the end of the story, Jim begins yelling at her, laying out all of her past wrongdoings. The story ends with Irene listening to the radio and hearing only the days news. The radio caused the upheaval of the average life of the Westport and exposed them to the evil of the world around them, an evil that they were before ignorant of and now they realize resides within their own family. These stories perfectly reflect Achievers tendency to portray characters in conflict with their inner desires and the reality of their external world.