Vonnegut's most obvious literary precedents are his own works, but critics have compared his approach to writing to that of an improvising jazzman for whom plot and character are not as interesting as the sentence he is writing, just as the jazz musician cares about the song only as a means to the end of self-expression.

Vonnegut is often compared to Jack Kerouac, but the two free-form writers improvise in different ways. Another literary ancestor is Laurence Sterne, who in Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) wrote a novel that is more important for how it is written than what is said.