SOURCE: Hutchings, William. Review of Recital of the Dog, by David Rabe. World Literature Today 68, no. 2 (spring 1994): 371.

In the following review, Hutchings cites parallels between Recital of the Dog and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Not since the Ancient Mariner wantonly shot the albatross has the more or less capricious killing of an animal touched off so bizarre and perverse a series of events as those that occur after the shooting of Barney the dog at the beginning of playwright David Rabe's first novel, Recital of the Dog. These repercussions become increasingly ominous for the book's first-person narrator, an artist who has withdrawn to the countryside with his wife and son in pursuit of rustic tranquillity: he is beset by hand tremors that prevent him from painting, a guilt-ridden obsession with the aged owner's futile search for the missing pet, and finally a compulsive...