The painting has been described as a "masterpiece of melodrama", and is one of the artist's earliest images depicting women in tragic situations, a theme to which he often returned in the mid-1960s.

This narrative element highlights the clichéd melodrama, while its graphics — including Ben-Day dots that echo the effect of the printing process — reiterate Lichtenstein's theme of painterly work that imitates mechanized reproduction.

[5] Lichtenstein said that, at the time, "I was very excited about, and very interested in, the highly emotional content yet detached impersonal handling of love, hate, war, etc., in these cartoon images.

The style he adopted was "simple, well-framed images comprised of solid fields of bold color often bounded by thick, stark border lines.

"[11] The borrowed technique was "representing tonal variations with patterns of colored circles that imitated the half-tone screens of Ben-Day dots used in newspaper printing".

"[9] The subject of Drowning Girl is an example of Lichtenstein's post-1963 comics-based women who "look hard, crisp, brittle, and uniformly modish in appearance, as if they all came out of the same pot of makeup.

In Lichtenstein's obituary, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight said the work was "a witty rejoinder to De Kooning's famously brushy paintings of women".

It was also part of his second solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery from September 28 – October 24, 1963 that included Torpedo...Los!, Baseball Manager, In the Car, Conversation, and Whaam!.

[30][31] The Museum of Modern Art acquired Drowning Girl in 1971,[32] and their webpage for this work credits Philip Johnson and Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright for the acquisition.

Lichtenstein's version of the scene eliminates everything but the sea and a few body parts of the subject: her head, shoulder and hand, which are barely above the water.

[34] According to The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, the most important element of Lichtenstein's procedure in the early 1960s was "the enlargement and unification of his source material".

Todd Brewster noted that this may have been motivated by popular demand; he told Life in 1986 that "Those cartoon blowups may have disturbed the critics, but collectors, tired of the solemnity of abstract expressionism, were ready for some comic relief.

"[9] His work is now widely accepted, although some criticize him for borrowing from comics without attributing the original creators, paying royalties, or seeking permission from copyright holders.

Kinstler said Lichtenstein lacked the ability to portray the emotional range of the story through facial expressions and body language independently.

[47] In 1993, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curator Diane Waldman noted that Lichtenstein made Drowning Girl a cornerstone of his career because of "his extraordinary sense of organization, his ability to use a sweeping curve and manipulate it into an allover pattern".

[51] Lichtenstein's tinkering with the source material resulted in a recomposition with sharper focus after he eliminated several elements that distract from the depiction of the woman, such as the capsized boat, troubled male subject and the general seascape.

The result, Lanchner wrote, was swirling, swooping waves and "animate white foam" that envelope the subject with a "pictorial buoyancy" that form an "aquatic continuum".

[54] Lichtenstein has claimed a strong relation between the original comic book source panel and Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, making this work a bridge between the two.

I saw it and then pushed it a little further until it was a reference that most people will get ... it is a way of crystallizing the style by exaggeration.Tøjner describes the work as "Lichtenstein's finest formulation of a counter-image to the many explosions in his universe", noting that the drama is past its peak although it may seem to be at a crescendo.

[58] He also notes that "the tears are drawn with classic Lichtenstein waxy fullness" despite the surrounding water, which must be significant since "naturalistic justification" is absent.

In Art Magazine's review of his 1964 Castelli Gallery show, Lichtenstein was referred to as the author of I Don't Care, I'd Rather Sink (Drowning Girl).

[29] In 2005, Gary Garrels of the Museum of Modern Art wrote that the work is a "poetics of the utterly banal, of displaced ordinariness" resulting in an "image frozen in time and space", making it "iconic".

[42] According to The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, extreme examples of his formalization become "virtual abstraction" when the viewer recalls that the motif is an element of a larger work.

Thus, Lichtenstein reinforced a non-realist view of comic strips and advertisements, presenting them as artificial images with minimalistic graphic techniques.

Lichtenstein's magnification of his source material stressed the plainness of his motifs as an equivalent to mechanical commercial drawing, leading to implications about his statements on modern industrial America.

[12] In 2003, Sarah Rich and Joyce Henri Robinson contrasted Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots use in Drowning Girl with another artist's work, noting that the work "satirizes the melodrama of soap operas and serial comics, turning the drama of the title figure's potential suicide into a high camp performance".

[59] In 2009, Lanchner wrote of how Lichtenstein's translation of a "highly charged" content with coolly handled presentation intensified the contrast between the two.