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Jeremy Edwards
Professor Cummings
English 204
21 March, 2006
Cheever's Suspenseful Use of Literary Elements
In John Cheever's "The Swimmer," things fall apart in a very suspenseful way. This is achieved by various literary elements including point of view and setting. Cheever uses these elements in a way that creates suspense that you can feel and sucks your mind into the story.
Cheever uses the third person point of view to tell this story, but more importantly he uses what is known as "psychic distance". Psychic distance refers to the mental or emotional distance between the narrator and the point-of-view characters (Steele 5). The easiest way to picture this is to think of film, where the camera can show the characters from close up or far away or anywhere in between. With first-person narration, the "camera" is always up close because the narrator is a character in the story, but third-person narrators have the freedom to move their "camera" around (Steele 5). The......

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Approximate Word Count: 677
Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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