Cheever's conception for the story was originally a straightforward and unambiguous invocation of the Greek myth of Narcissus.[27]
Cheever recalled:
When I began, the story was to have been a simple one about Narcissus. I started with the image of that boy looking into the water. Then I thought...it's absurd to limit him to a tight mythological plot - being trapped in his own image, in a single pool. This man loves swimming! So in my first version I let him out, and he swam in an immense number of pools- thirty of them! But then I began to narrow it down, and narrow it down, and something began happening. It was growing cold and quiet. It was turning into winter.[28]
Cheever deepened the metaphoric and mythic elements. Biographer Patrick Meanor identifies several layers of ancient myth and legend in Cheever's story. Among these are Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail and the Fisher King, the Homeric tale of Odysseus, and a Dante-like descent into the netherworld.[29]
Meanor also notes "an ethnic arrangement" for the names of the couples Neddy Merrill encounters on his fateful trek, beginning with Scots and English surnames of WASPs, then to surnames associated with "German to the Jewish to the Irish." Meanor also detects a highly crafted "water metaphor" in the ontological roots of these names.[30]
“The countless drinks along the way are part of a larger pattern of willful oblivion, repressing problems so troubling that they cannot be raised to the surface of consciousness. We now see that like Chekhovian characters…Neddy Merrill has in fact chosen to lose touch with the truth rather than suffer under its crushing weight.”—Literary critic James E. O’Hara in John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction (1989).[31]
Literary critic Lynne Waldeland notes that the significance of Neddy Merrill's "Lucinda River" is no mere juvenile escapade, and Cheever makes this explicit in the story's narrative: "He was not a practical joker nor was he a fool but he was determinedly an original and he had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure." Waldeland concludes that "the real point of the story is the celebratory motive of Neddy's act with the social realities that emerge as the story progresses, realities that have to do with the role wealth and social status play in the world which Neddy wishes to invest with legendary beauty and meaning...Whatever "happened" we have seen a brightly lit, intelligible, comfortable world suddenly become dark and cold. The story, like a nightmare, leaves the reader with a residual uneasiness."[32]
Literary critic Samuel Coale observes that "The Swimmer" confronts both his protagonist and the reader with a shocking epiphany:
...the stunning truth of these disasters at the end of the story undercuts totally Neddy's own self-gratifying celebration of the suburban existence…Cheever carefully laid the trail toward the deserted house, so that when the reader arrives there, he is stunned by the transformation that takes place between his first impressions of Neddy Merrill and his final understanding.[33]
