The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant

Sheila Mant—whose name descends, through the Gaelic and Latin languages, from the ancient Roman name for “heavenly”—is the unattainable girl next door. Her loveliness is made all the more achingly beautiful by its disdainful remoteness. For the narrator, she’s the epitome of his romantic yearnings; for the reader, she’s clearly a pretty, somewhat spoiled teenager who feels no need to cater to the delusions of the infatuated narrator when the object of her affection is a college student. Sitting with her in a boat teaches the narrator that Sheila is not simply a beautiful object to catch but a human being with her own interests and desires—one who finds fishing boring, for instance, and who has never thought of the narrator as a romantic possibility.

Eric Caswell is a student at Dartmouth College, where he rows on the crew team, whose members the narrator sees losing focus every time they scull past the floating dock where Sheila likes to sunbathe. Unlike the narrator’s unrealistic desire for Sheila, Sheila’s interest in Eric has basis: Eric has told her that “I have the figure to model” (Paragraph 45). Sheila later abandons the narrator to get a ride home “in Eric Caswell’s Corvette” (Paragraph 56). Eric, whom we never meet, is everything the narrator isn’t: older, more mature, with ambitions beyond catching a bass.