[Miss Murdoch's] novels are copiously endowed with details; however, these details are not selected solely to satisfy the demands of realism…. [Her] fiction is rich in details that serve as allusions: incorporated in each of her works is a background of material selected from earlier literary classics, myths, biographies, and so forth. Since her novels seldom display an extended parallel with an earlier work, her practice is perhaps closer to that of Eliot in The Waste Land than to that of Joyce in Ulysses. (p. 361)

The narrator of Under The Net, Jake Donaghue, states that his acquaintance with Hugo Belfounder is "the central theme" of the book: consequently, he spends considerable time in the novel describing Hugo's background, personality and ideas…. While interested in theories about everything, Hugo has a great distrust of generalities and of language, in particular of the use of language to describe one's emotions...