548 Characterization

The Five-Forty-Eight
In John Cheever’s short story The Five-Forty-Eight, characterization proves a necessary component to the complete understanding of the story’s deeper meaning. Cheever’s ability to clearly depict his character’s various emotional and social insecurities confirms his evident commentary on the upper end of the social hierarchy. Cheever also touches on the sensibility of the mentally unstable, and the universal question of “who is truly the crazy one?” Through Blake and Miss Dent, Cheever’s main characters, the author reinforces his beliefs on the classes.
Blake is a full, round character whose flawed traits give him depth and make him more believable. He organizes his world around him according to categories— by social ranking. What is evident from the beginning is that he is in a class all on his own and everyone he encounters are below him. When he sits on the train, he immediately classifies the passengers into his twisted caste system, where he is at the top. When he hired Miss Dent in the first place, his tone was piteous, and he judged her like one would judge an inanimate object. After she “thanked him for giving her a chance” (80), he took advantage of her like “the many women he had known had been picked for their lack of self-esteem” (80). Another example of how he puts everyone below him is simply the manner in which he acts with his family. When his wife didn’t prepare supper, he “pointed out that today was the fifth. He had drawn a circle around the date on the kitchen calendar. ‘One week is the twelfth,’ he had said. ‘Two weeks will be the nineteenth.’ He drew a circle around the nineteenth. ‘I’m not going to speak to you for two weeks.’” (82). His behavior at home with his own relations shows that he can not believe that anyone one is on his level. He builds himself a separate room, a kingdom, to keep not only his wife out, but his children as well. What is interesting is that Cheever never mentions that “Louise Blake” is really Blake’s wife. This choice of introducing her in this manner says a lot about Blake’s feeling towards personal matters. Everything for him is formal, because he does not get emotionally involved. In the end, when Miss Dent forces him to kneel and put his face in mud, it is an evident stab at Blake’s ego and self-righteousness. After he is covered from head to toe in filth and wounded by coal, he simply “picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen and walked home” (89).
The author insinuates that Blake is the “truly crazy one” by using Miss Dent as one of his delusions. Since Blake is portrayed as a man who is unable to feel remorse or guilt, Cheever uses Miss Dent as a hallucination of Blake’s to depict his guilt finally forcing through his unfeeling, formal, lifestyle. After the horrible pain he caused Miss Dent by using her then firing her, she finally came back to haunt him. After some futile attempts to “lose” her by visiting a men’s bar and drinking it off, he forgets her for a while. However, after missing the express train which was most likely more expensive and filled with richer people, he is forced to take the 548— the local. Here he is reminded once again of the “lower class” and Miss Dent suddenly returns. Knowing that she was hospitalized and was often unwell, Blake’s mind sees her holding a gun to him and threatening his life. This vision is his repressed guilt finally forcing its way through to him, frightening him into changing his ways. This figment of his imagination was really his subconscious finally compelling him to succumb to the guilt that he hasn’t felt in years. By the end of the story, he is a completely changed man. The vernacular of the story changes from eloquent and formal to very simple and blatant— “he picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen and walked home” (89).
Cheever’s belief about social order shines through this compelling tale about a heartless man’s delusions that change his life. The method in which he introduces, develops, and changes his character emphasizes his message. The Five-Forty-Eight was a strong example of well-executed characterization.