My journey narrative is "The Swimmer", a short story by John Cheever.  The story focuses on Neddy Merrill, an established, middle-aged suburbanite from anytown America.  It opens with Neddy and his family, spending an afternoon at their friend's pool.  It's a beautiful summer day, and every one is enjoying themselves.  Rather randomly, Neddy decides he is going to swim back to his house, through every pool in the county.  Neddy begins his journey (leaving his family) full of energy.  He makes his way from pool to pool, continuously greeted with drinks and warm hellos from friends.  Neddy is clearly popular throughout his community.  As his journey progresses, however, time begins to slip away......

     What began as an invigorating swim through the neighborhood turns into something quite darker.  It is no longer bright and sunny, but ominously gloomy.  Instead of just going from concrete to water to concrete, Neddy must now trek through wooded areas, lamenting the difficulty of traversing such terrain in nothing but swim shorts.  But perhaps most strangely, Neddy is no longer received warmly by his friends.  Many people offer condolences for financial, and other, problems Neddy doesn't remember.  Neddy also finds that, not only does he lack the energy he started with, he is suspiciously tired.  As he gets closer to his own home, the weather has clearly shifted from that of summer to that of fall, and Neddy is now explicitly spurned at the pools he tries to swim through.  Finally reaching home, in what seemed like an afternoon, Neddy finds his house and property neglected and decaying, behind locked gates.

     This narrative is somewhat different from the ones we read in class, in that it doesn't start from A, go to B, then back to A, but simply goes from B (the pool) back to A (Neddy's house).  This story takes a rather surreal turn, through the distortion time.  Instead of being outright presented with the problems Neddy faced, we are forced to think of them ourselves.  And there are many problems a man taking months to swim home would face.  Nature plays an interesting role in this story, as we see the weather shift from summer to autumn.  As his journey progresses, Neddy is forced to trek through increasingly wooded (natural) and dangerous areas, perhaps representing his own  downfall.  Neddy finally makes it back to his house, only to find it rotting and abandoned.  Neddy clearly mourns the loss of his family and home, but also laments that he (and us) will never know what truly happened.  This is a different kind of journey narrative, but one I really enjoyed.