This story affords readers a rich contemplation of humility, and it should be of interest to those concerned with the promotion of professional identity formation through medical education.  The culture has provided the young narrator with a life-role in which he may elevate himself above common humanity and be respected as a rescuer.  His role as divinity student resembles the one of lifeguard, and the young man finds himself—glistening in the sun, enthralled with his own beauty—working through complex theological arguments over the nature of the human, while the flock below him lives delightfully through a joyous human experience from which he’s removed himself.  The fate of the young man may encourage health professionals in formation to reflect on the ways that culture may divinize them—and the ways that their complicity in this dynamic may lead to their loneliness and impoverishment.  It also allows professionals opportunities to reflect upon and discuss experiences when their therapeutic interventions have made little if any contribution to positive outcomes in patients—when they’ve beheld the astounding capacity of the body to heal itself or witnessed patients finding a path to health and happiness without the aid of medical intervention or wisdom.  

The ambiguity of the Lifeguard’s concluding insight should foster rewarding conversations amongst readers.  On the one hand, the Lifeguard appears to have reached the precipice of a devastating insight of his near uselessness.  On the other hand, this very sense of uselessness may be the means by which the Lifeguard re-gains his humanity.  “Swimming offers a parable,” he observes.  “We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.”  

A note on the genre.  To regard the piece simply as a short story is to misconstrue its significant complexities.  It features a lyric progression more than it does a narrative progression.  The narrative absorbs us, this is to say, in a contemplation rather than a story: story and plot generally stand still here.  We share in the Lifeguard’s life as stuck in rumination.  The piece amounts to the inverse of an ekphrasis, too: the exquisite language is, in effect, the painted portrait entitled “Lifeguard,” which has yet to exist on canvas.  (We recall Updike’s considerable education as an artist.)  It’s as though we’re imagining, with Updike, the painting of a lifeguard and wondering what such a cultural icon might say.  Those in the health professionals might re-conceive the portrait, analogously, as “physician,” and wonder what this cultural icon has to say.