John Cheever's Stories Affect the People of Suburbia

However, were Cheever merely saying that Lawrence is an hard-pressed man who should be utterly pitied, a man who has naught true to say nearly the drawbacks of suburb, the serve would be a sermon or diatribe instead of a work of art. What gives Lawrence his strength as a character, miserable as he is, is that he does have some truth to tell ab verboten his environment and the people who live in it. His brother, the narrator, refers to Lawrence:

I had perceive him say . . . that we and our friends and our part of the country, finding ourselves unable to cope with the problems of the present, had, standardised a wretched adult, turned back to what we supposed was a happier and a simpler time, and that our taste for reconstruction and candlelight was a amount of money of the irremediable failure (Cheever 8).

To draw distinction between Lawrence's views on suburbia and opposing views, Cheever immediately includes his mother's declaration: "Let's go fluent and have Martinis on the beach.

. . . Let's have a fabulous break of day" (Cheever 9).

The dream of suburbia here is shown to be not but an escape from the ills of the city, from the ills of poverty-stricken and violence-stricken environs, but from the very past itself. The suburbia of the 1950s, for example, allowed its residents to be lie downve they had indeed escaped these ills, but the suburbia of afterwards years, during which about half of Cheever's stories take place, is a dream or fantasy world much-threatened by those encroaching ills. The people of

The narrator reveals a contradiction which exposes the lie of his claims. How many migrant travelers exploring the world take their cook on? The fact is that the people in this story and the other both stories see themselves as an elite, superior who have earned their come out in smell and who deserve to live a animateness of luxury and ease. They imagine that their success has allowed them to somehow isolate themselves in a higher place and beyond the problems and suffering of people who have not achieved the suburban the Statesn dream. The American Dream is, in fact, the dream of life in suburbia, with the dog and cat and swimming pool and seaboard home.

Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on. Those in the emigrant generations who could not reassert brute survival died young and far from home. Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in good America (Kingston 5).

By the time they got to the laundry, the boiler was screaming impetuous and the machines were ready. "Don't touch or lean against any machine," Brave orchid warned her sister. "Your skin would fry and peel off. . . . All the jobs seemed hard for laze Orchid. . . . The buttons on the presses seemed too complicated for her to push---and what if she caught her hands or her vanguard inside a press? (Kingston 136).

The difficulties of assimilation, and of simultaneously maintaining a nexus with Chinese culture, are multiplied for a female. Kingston shows that thither are few occupations available to the immigrant Chinese in America at the time of her girlhood in California. She grows up in a laundry, for example. Other Chinese, seen as powerful beings in China, are in America reduced to collecting dirty dishes:

So miserable is Kingston as a child, trying without success to make sense of the contradictions of the culture clash around and inwardly her, tha
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