The Swimmers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Pool

The pool is a central symbol in The Swimmers. It is mentioned in the first words of the novel and is the subject of the first section’s title. For some of the swimmers, the pool symbolizes an escape from the disappointing and frustrating aspects of their lives. For others, the pool symbolizes a source of healing, like medicine for their physical, mental, and emotional injuries. Ironically, this symbol of healing also represents addiction. The swimmers’ devotion to the pool is considered excessive by some, even pathological. They think about swimming in bed at night, and if they spend too much time away from the pool, they experience withdrawal symptoms like irritability, poor concentration, and anxiety.

On a broader level, the pool can be viewed as an alternate, parallel reality, a utopian version of life in which the swimmers are their best selves. Located deep underground “in a large cavernous chamber many feet beneath the streets of our town” (3) with the ceiling painted to look like a cloudy sky, the pool’s setting evokes conventional ideas of a parallel dimension. The pool has its own divisions and hierarchies, like its counterpart reality. It has deep and shallow ends; fast, medium, and slow lanes; terms for outsiders—”Land people, we say” (13)—and assumed binaries with its “separate but equal entrances for women and men” (16). This alternate reality becomes a utopia for the swimmers, in one sense, by offering order in a world of chaos. The physical layout is highly organized, and thorough sets of rules, both formal and unwritten, leave the swimmers without any doubts about how they should behave and what they can expect during their time at the pool. Compared with the turmoil of the world aboveground, with its natural disasters, wars, beauty standards, and other daily stressors, the pool is a place of solace and freedom, a parallel but better world.

The Crack

Like the pool, the crack that appears on its floor in Part 2 symbolizes numerous overlapping concepts. From a visual perspective, it represents trauma via its wound-like shape. Someone suggests that “the crack is not a crack at all but a wound that will eventually close up and heal, leaving behind only the faintest trace of a scar” (38). As evidenced by one swimmer’s response when it momentarily disappears—“I just figured it would always be there”—the crack also symbolizes the cycle of human attachment and loss.

Through months of scientific study, the crack stymies efforts by experts and amateurs alike to understand what caused it. By highlighting this inability to find answers despite a determined, obsessive need to know, the crack symbolizes powerlessness. The swimmers, the experts, and the public at large cannot will their way to knowledge beyond their reach. One swimmer vows to ignore the crack to maintain “the upper hand” but finds herself unable to resist staring at it, as if compelled (37), thus expanding on the idea of powerlessness.

Drawing connections between the novel’s first two sections and its final three illuminates the deeper symbolic meaning of the crack. Between Parts 2 and 3, the story switches focus to Alice and her dementia. The pool’s closure is portrayed as the event that accelerates Alice’s cognitive decline. Thus, the crack symbolizes the onset of dementia or any major illness. The swimmers ask questions about the crack similar to those asked after receiving a medical diagnosis: Is the crack “malignant or benign? […] Who is to blame for it? Can we reverse it? And, most importantly, Why us?” (38). The progression of Alice’s dementia is revealed through the memories she loses over time. A single crack in the pool turns into many cracks, representing the growing cracks in Alice’s memory and the eventual fracturing of her identity.

Though Julie Otsuka wrote most of The Swimmers before the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, the book’s 2022 publication sparked comparisons of the crack’s symbolism to the disruption the pandemic caused. In interviews, Otsuka has acknowledged the crack can be interpreted in many different ways, including the onset of COVID-19 or the reception of a terrifying diagnosis. It can encompass all these things because ultimately, as the author says, the crack symbolizes rupture and the unknown.

The Inevitability of Death

An idea that becomes a motif in The Swimmers is the inevitability of death. Otsuka contrasts cultural norms in confronting this truth, saying in interviews that the Japanese are less squeamish about dealing with death and consider it a part of life. The confrontation with this inevitability becomes much more personal, however, when it touches a close family member. Her reflections on wanting to make amends with a mother whose death is approaching and worrying it might be too late inspired much of Alice’s story in The Swimmers.

Death’s inevitability is confronted by the swimmers, who view swimming as a way to make the most of life despite loss and hardship. Alice’s confrontation with death’s inevitability is much more terrifying, given its nearness. Belavista’s cold insistence, on multiple occasions, that her condition will only worsen and that she is in the final phase of her journey doesn’t make it an easier pill to swallow. The experiences of being neglected and devalued at Belavista while falling apart physically and mentally from dementia ultimately make death seem not only inevitable but welcoming.

Some of the swimmers’ descriptions of the pool and the euphoric state of bliss they experience in the water evoke an image of the pool as a symbolic womb. If the initial setting of the narrative is a womb, the story must also acknowledge the opposing boundary of life by asking its characters to confront death’s inevitability.