John Cheever's The Swimmer is a truly unique piece and, unlike many works, works on two different timescales. A time scale runs on the player's time scale, as it travels from one pool to another. The second time scale can be interpreted as over the course of many years, as his life passes him by and he eventually realizes that he has lost his home and family, but due to his upper class suburban life, he does not he didn't even notice that this happened. This alone makes it different from many other works; however, it is argued that the Swimmer alluded to other classical works. This includes allusions to classic works by Homer and F. Scott Fitzgerald in particular. In William Rodney Allen's critique he states that The Swimmer alludes primarily to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Terence Bowers believes that there is an allusion mainly to the Odyssey, which according to him is written in the same structure and with similar protagonist characters. In both critiques, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on the similarities between the protagonist characters of each work. Allen states that Ned Merrell is very similar to Jay Gatsby, and Terence Bowers sees Ned more as an Odysseus. Each source provides examples for its own argument; however there is room to argue against this too. In The Swimmer, there are definite allusions to these great classical works, however, Cheever distinguishes his work in many ways and adds his own uniqueness to this piece. William Rodney Allen's criticism in Studies in Short Fiction focuses on John Cheever's allusion to The Great Gatsby. He believes there are many references to the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald starting from the beginning when Ned refers to his list of pools he has to cross. He......middle sheet......creates lists to accomplish. The main differences we see in The Great Gatsby Swimmer are that a journey/epic occurs in Cheever's piece that is not seen in The Great Gatsby. Ned is trying to get home, his great journey is back to comfort. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's piece, we see that Jay Gatsby is trying to enter the upper class and maintain a social position there. He eventually reaches the highest social ladder, but reaches death. Ned's failure is something that is not directly told to us in the pages of the story, however the reader can infer from the conversation Ned overhears at the Biswangers, that he has had financial problems and has gone broke. (Cheever 735).Works CitedCheever, John. "The swimmer." The Northon Anthology American Literature. 8th ed. vol. E. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. Print.