All the Donleavy signature techniques from The Ginger Man are repeated in A Fairy Tale of New York, with little development or adaptation. The epigrammatic poems at the chapter ends are often clever, at times brilliant, and occasionally dull. The shifts from omniscient to first-person narrative are more frequent and less effective, in part because of their frequency and in part because the character Christian is inherently less interesting than Dangerfield. Although there is much to sympathize with in Christian's predicament, the whining tone of his recollection of his orphan status and the total lack of introspection about his responsibility for himself and to his fellows do little to offset the objective narrative facts that suggest that he represents self-absorption at its very worst.