Allusion in The Swimmer, by John Cheever

John Cheever’s The Swimmer is a piece that is very unique, and unlike many works, it is running on two different time scales. One time scale is running on the readers time scale, as he is journeying from pool to pool. The second time scale can be interpreted as over the course of many years, as his life passes him by and he realizes by the end that he has lost his house and his family, yet due to his suburban upper class living, he has not even noticed that this has occurred. This alone makes it unlike many other works; however, the Swimmer is argued to have alluded to other classic works. This includes allusions to classic works by Homer and F. Scott Fitzgerald most notably. In William Rodney Allen’s critique he asserts that The Swimmer alludes primarily to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Terence Bowers believes there is allusion primarily to The Odyssey, which he believes is written in the same structure and with similar protagonist characters. In both critiques, there is a large emphasis placed on the similarities between the protagonist characters of each work. Allen asserts that Ned Merrell is very similar to Jay Gatsby, and Terence Bowers sees Ned as more of an Odysseus. Each source provides examples for their argument; however there is room to make argument against this as well. In the Swimmer, there are definite allusions to these classic great works, however, Cheever sets his work apart in many ways, and adds his own uniqueness to this piece.

William Rodney Allen’s critique in Studies in Short Fiction focuses on John Cheever’s allusion to The Great Gatsby. He believes there are many references to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work starting from the very beginning when Ned references his list of pools he must cross. He ...

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...create lists to accomplish. The main major differences that we see in The Swimmer from the Great Gatsby are that there is a journey/epic happening in Cheever’s piece that you don’t see in The Great Gatsby. Ned is searching to go back home, his big journey is to return to comfort. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s piece, we see that Jay Gatsby is trying to break into the upper class, and maintain social standing there. He eventually reaches the top social ladder, but reaches demise. Ned’s failure is something that we are not directly told within the pages of the story, however the reader can infer from the conversation that Ned overhears at the Biswangers, that he has run into financial troubles and has gone broke. (Cheever 735).

Works Cited

Cheever, John. "The Swimmer." The Northon Anthology American Literature. 8th ed. Vol. E. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.