SOURCE: “Damned in a Fair Life: Cheever's ‘The Swimmer,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 30, No. 3, 1993, pp. 367-75.

In the following essay, Kozikowski argues that “The Swimmer” is a spiritual allegory owing much to Dante's Inferno in its subject and structure.

Cheever's ever-popular, many-faceted short story, “The Swimmer,” accommodates various readings, particular and universal. Within its range of appeal, for instance, it has been read as suggestive autobiography,¹ contemporary American Odyssey (Hunt 280-83), dazzling literary structure (Kruse 221), as a “midsummer's nightmare” (Bell 433), sacramental parody (Blythe and Sweet 393), realism yielding to fantasy (Blythe and Sweet 415) and Neddy Merrill dead in Hades (Cervo 49-50). I propose that the story, along with its literal and figural resonances, has the suggestive depth of a spiritual allegory in the fashion of Dante, whom Cheever admired, and whose influence he acknowledged affectionately.² As a terse and grim Commedia, “The Swimmer” evinces a pattern of...