The Silver Pillow is a gothic tale, featuring ghostly influences and psychological insight. From its inception, the gothic literary genre has used superstitions about the supernatural world to symbolize personality traits.

The monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is a complicated being, but among other aspects of the personality of his creator, he represents the reckless lust to acquire knowledge without understanding it. In Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the character of Mr. Hyde represents the evil that lurks within every personality. The subject of the crazed mind is also common in gothic literature. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe presents such characters in several of his tales such as "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), and "The Black Cat" (1843). A more recent writer, H. P. Lovecraft, often sets his fiendish characters in urban locales, just as Disch does in his tale.