Like James Joyce in Ulysses, Updike drew on the myths of antiquity in an attempt to turn a modern and common scene into something more profound, a meditation on life and man's relationship to nature and eternity.[11][12] George is both the Centaur Chiron and Prometheus (some readers might see George's son Peter as Prometheus), Mr. Hummel, the automobile mechanic, is Hephaestus (AKA Vulcan); and so forth.[13]
The novel's structure is unusual; the narrative shifts from present day (late 1940s) to prospective (early 1960s), from describing the characters as George, Vera, and the rest, to the Centaur, Venus, and so forth. It also is punctuated with a feverish dream scene and George's obituary. Near the end of the novel, Updike includes two untranslated Greek sentences. Their translation is as follows:
Having an incurable wound, he delivered himself into the cave. Wanting, and being unable, to have an end, because he was immortal, [then with] Prometheus offering himself to Zeus to become immortal for him, thus he died.
This quote is from Bibliotheca 2.5.4, and describes the death of Chiron.
“Updike’s willingness to assign tremendous significance to his childhood home reaches a crescendo in The Centaur, a powerful attempt to mythologize the artist’s early portrait by returning, as James Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), to ancient Greek stories.”—Author and critic Stacey Olster in The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006)[14]
Novelist and literary critic Joyce Carol Oates reports that The Centaur represents a “balance” between “the classical-artistic-‘immoral’” aspects of Updike’s creative interests and his Calvanistic background.[15] Oates writes:
The Centaur, being a relatively early and emotionally biographical work, is valuable in its obvious statement of the dichotomy in the author’s imagination between the “pagan” and the “Christian”....surely the example of Joyce’s Ulysses was always in his mind…”[16]
Oates reports that Updike’s wished to provide his protagonist George Caldwell—and for himself—“another spiritual dimension in which they might be heroic without being heretical.”[17]
