The names Laura, Boris, and Jean appear in an earlier novel. According to Ilona Leki in Alain Robbe-Grillet (1983), Un Regicide "contains so many seeds of the themes and novelistic concerns which were to develop later throughout Robbe-Grillet's work." It would seem then that, in addition to the literary influences of novelists like James Cain, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, and Samuel Beckett, RobbeGrillet is his own literary precedent. It is particularly intriguing to note the variations on the theme of the Oedipus myth throughout his work; it is suggested by the very title Un Regicide, built into the structure of The Erasers, where a man seeking a murderer finds it to be himself, alluded to in Djinn, in the image of the blind Simon being led by a child, and made explicit in Simon's musing that he "must have an Oedipus complex."