Analysis Of John Cheever’s Neo-realism Fictions

The thesis,with proceeding from John Cheever’s short and long stories andfollowing the main line of the living environment of middle class of postwarAmerican and the inner heart characteristics that John Cheever are trying to show inhis works, has been divided into three chapters to analysis the neo-realism fictions ofhim one by one systematically and objectively.After the Second World War drawing its curtain, the United States achieved anew period of development in politics and economy as well. Thanks to that, Americanliterature, which can be called Modern Literature at that time, moved into a completenew time. The prosperity and flourish is measured not only by the quantities ofwriters and their works but also by the full blossom of all sort of schools of literature.The postwar realistic novels are the remarkable one that made a great performance.The third generation of American realism novelists is the leading force of the postwarnovels of realism. The works of the third generation writers contain some unrealisticelements which are adopted from modernism and are generally called as novel ofneo-realism from this perspective.The reasons that realism can play an important role on the multicultural stage ofAmerican are the rich possibility of description; the practical applicability of suckingup the nutrition from daily life and the character of reflecting society and humannature from different views. Therefore, even under the special social background ofpostwar, realism still showed great sense of existence. It’s worth to pay attention thatcomparing with the old one, the realism novels of postwar American have weaken thestriking sense of critics and not emphasized the descriptions of substance and reality.Meanwhile, they have shifted their focus on people’s thoughts, commonly existedsocial state of mind in the sickness society and the responses to the distort society inpeople’s heart.John Cheever is one of the outstanding one of postwar realism novelists. He hadfound a way of writing belonged to him after inheriting the traditions of old realism.In American literature, John Cheever is considered as a writer of social custom and is called as Chekhov of suburbs for his short stories. In his advanced years, JohnCheever won a lot of high praises by the publication of Falconer, a novel put out in1977. John Cheever took the middle class people of American as the main characterof his stories. He was trying to show the life and thoughts of the middle class peoplewho were lived in the suburbs of the cities to the readers by a plain style of writing.As to the skills, John Cheever, on the one hand, inherited some from the traditionalsense of realism, and has drawn on achievements of modernism on the other hand. Itis a great breakthrough that the short stories and novels of John Cheever have gainedthe new characteristics by making a good use of skills of modernism.The inheritance of John Cheever from realism mainly refers to the creation ofthe typical characters and environment. He has created a lot of characters who have astrong sense of the middle class of American with a typical background named ShadyHill. These characters that are considered as one with outstanding moral qualities areseemed to live a decent, rich life. Actually, their hearts are crowded with greedy,humble, and selfish desire. It makes the characters be more vivid and full with dualdescriptions. By the same time, Shady Hill also has two meanings that the tender andsweet place people live in is cradle of crime and evils in reality.The remarkable points of John Cheever’s stories are composed of two parts.Firstly, in order to analysis the main characters of postwar United States, JohnCheever criticized the society of morality lapse and crashed spirits by unveiling thepeople’s sickness of their soul. Secondly, on the purpose of exposing the socialcharacters, John Cheever has draw on all the achievements of skills of modernismwhich contains both existentialism and naturalism.