More recent precedents than Shakespeare or Chaucer include such large, wordy comic novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767).

Indeed, Ignatius' vocabulary, the author's satirical point of view, and the fact that the novel's title is borrowed from Swift, all point to eighteenth-century influences.

Toole's caricatures are reminiscent of Charles Dickens's style. The novel has been compared to the modern theater of the absurd, and to contemporary black comedy novels such as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978).

However, Toole's novel is more purely comic than those of Heller and Irving, and it lacks their dark tragic vision.