Where did Ned come from?

My guess is that he was invited to stay the weekend at an old friend's place in the elegant neighborhood where he used to own a summer house. He drank heavily the night before and he woke up still somewhat intoxicated. Finding himself in the luxurious surroundings he was once accustomed to was enough to convince him that good times were back and nothing had changed. As a previous poster said, it's the end of summer in New England, probably a weekend or two after Labor Day. It's just warm enough to swim for a few hours in the mid-day but it cools off early.

I think it is entirely credible that the events take place in the space of a single day. I like the way the Biswangers were portrayed as the sort of vulgar new money that Ned Merrill once looked down on with their vast, golf-themed aluminum and plastic hangar of a poolside party house. It's a neat inversion that Ned who once looked down on these parvenus is reduced to screaming at them over a rinky-tink pushcart.

The story and the film make it unclear, but I always thought of Ned as one of "those" rich people who go off kilter and have to be shipped off to another relative, maybe an old aunt or cousin who was minding him rather than facing the stigma of having one of the Merrills in an institution. Ned just happened to have a disassociation episode one day, put on a pair of swimming trunks, and walked out of the door and wandered into his old neighborhood.

I might be reaching but I always imagined not long after Ned's complete mental breakdown at the shuttered door of his old house the cops came looking for him to take him back where he started.

I interpret Ned appearing out of the woods as allegory. He is dreaming or re-imagining his life (he has fallen off his high horse for one reason or another and maybe having an emotional/mental breakdown). This-for him- is a radically new approach to life because most likely in the past he was a man with a fabricated persona and ulterior motives. Ned is accustomed to living a life disconnected from interpersonal relationships from which people derive genuine satisfaction and rely on each other for emotional support. So when he approaches those who surround him in his daily life from this angle it seems foreign and bewildering, not only to him but to them as well. He has alienated himself and become seriously confused, left roaming the wilderness of his compromised psyche and soul. The time inevitably arrived for Ned to step out of the forest and into the revealing light of his most intimate reality. In addition, repeated references to the blue water and blue sky coupled with the close up of Ned's shimering blue eyes suggest that each lap he swims signifies his immersion into a portion of his subconsciousness since eyes are the "windows to the soul." Carrying that theory on step further, the town he is journeying through is immersed in the brilliant azure radiance of a warm, cloudless day; almost as if the sky is the water line and we are looking up from the the depths. So the entire town -and therefore the film- is a personification of Ned's memories, dreams, thoughts, emotions, and relationships.

I've never read the short story. So going strictly by the movie (which may be written TO be different from the short story), this is what I USED to think.

Ned is really there. Those neighbors are really there. He really is swimming the "river Lucinda" in one day. If it happened over the course of time, then others he came upon would know about crazy Ned showing up now and again to swim the "river Lucinda." But everyone is surprised.

He doesn't remember the last two years. The film is specific about the two year time frame.

I think that when he lost his position, then his financial situation caved, resulting in him being humiliated enough to ask friends for money, he had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized for a while. i had a neighbor growing up who had been insitutionalized and given shock treatments. She would forget short term things after the shock treatments. Her memory would eventually come back, though. I figured Ned had had shock treatments and so didn't remember the last two years. That's the point of shock treatments.

Ned gains his memory back gradually because of what people say to him, and also because his memory would come back, anyway, gradually, after shock treatments.

Although the short story apparently makes it clear he's still married to Lucinda in the story, in the movie there is really no indication that that's the case.

BUT NOW WHAT I THINK:

Some of the posts point out some interesting things. At the first pool, when he names the river of pools "river Lucinda," they say that's nice, etc. As if Lucinda is still in the picture, or is even dead. That's not what they would say if they'd had a nasty divorce or if he had killed her.

The first pool people talk to him like it's no surprise he's there, and he should've been at the party etc. They wouldn't have said that if he had been in an institution for a mental breakdown.

So the theories that other posters have that the swin takes place over a period of two years seems to fit a little better. BUT then, the pool neighbors would know, when he shows up in a bathing suit, what he's doing. Word would have gotten around about Ned swimming the "river Lucinda" over a period of time.

I should read the short story and see what I get out of that.

I'm thinking that maybe the young babysitter didn't even exist. That it was his imagination. That what she said about having a crush on him and that he was like some god to her, that was what he had imagined himself to be in her eyes, when she would come over to babysit. Ultimately, he was "just another shirt," she said, indicating he was just an ordinary man. Nothing special.

Lots of theories to consider. Very interesting.

But I still think that he probably had undergone shock treatments after having a breakdown.