Although itself a thoroughly original creation in technique and theme, The Ginger Man comes out of a distinguished tradition of literature of alienation and angst about death as rendering all experience futile. Dangerfield's energetic movement and dread of the stultifying effects of repressive societies, and his mockery of the conventions of those rules and inhibited persons, have precedents in works as diverse as Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, both of which treat liberation from repressive culture, what Salinger's hero calls "phony."

Huck lights out for the territory, and Sebastian runs from the gombeen man, which Donleavy associates with death, usurers, and madness. The Irish love of gab, language and riddle has inevitable precedents in Joyce and especially Flann O'Brien, while the cynicism that underlies the text as a whole resembles that in Kingsley Amis's One...