SOURCE: “A Key Pattern of Images in John Cheever's Short Fiction,” in Studies in Short Fiction,Vol. 26, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 463-72.

In the following excerpt, Fogelman examines the motifs of immersion in water, the breaking of a storm, and the journey through darkness into light in “Summer Theatre,” “The Swimmer,” and “The World of Apples.”

“My work or a great deal of my work … is quite apparently of subterranean water, with wells, with streams, with a search for water, and with a sound of rain,” Cheever remarked to an interviewer in 1978, following the publication of The Stories of John Cheever. “I like to think it's in such humble matters, humble and profound matters as that, that we're sympathetic.”¹ Indeed, the transforming and liberating potential of water is a central force in Cheever's stories, particularly in some of his best-known later works such as “The Swimmer” and “The World...