Lifeguard (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: John Updike
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Plot: Impressionistic
- Time of Work: The early 1960's
- Setting: An American beach
- Principal Characters: The lifeguard, The crowd at the beach
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
- Subjects: Sex or sexuality, Religion, Women’s issues, Stereotypes, Beaches or seashores, Aging, Protestantism or Protestant churches
- Locales: United States
The Story
No action takes place in this short story, only the musings of a divinity student pondering the purpose of life while gazing on swimmers and sun worshipers at the beach. A summer lifeguard, he is proud of his tanned, “edible” body. Transformed from the pallid seminarian who for the past nine months has pored confusedly over “handbooks of liturgy and histories of dogma,” he mounts his white wooden throne (with a red cross painted on the back) as though he were climbing into “a vestment.”
There is no contradiction, the lifeguard asserts, between the...
[The entire page is 1283 words long]
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