SOURCE: Allen, William Rodney. “Allusions to The Great Gatsby in John Cheever's ‘The Swimmer.’” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 3 (summer 1989): 289-93.

In the following essay, Allen explores allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in Cheever's “The Swimmer.”

Several literary echoes float through John Cheever's “The Swimmer.” Just as Cheever compresses much of a man's adult life into a single afternoon in this story, he also gives the reader a quick tour of literary history by alluding to works by Homer, Shakespeare, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His protagonist, Neddy Merrill, after hitting on the idea at a cocktail party of swimming home through the pools of his suburban friends, comes to resemble Ulysses wandering the Mediterranean on his return to Ithaca. As in Joyce's Ulysses, specific scenes in “The Swimmer” parallel such Homeric episodes as Ulysses' encounters with Scylla and Charybdis, Nausicaä, and Circe.¹ Early in the...