The Businessman is richly allusive to the writings of other authors. Not only is a John Berryman an important character in the novel, but the works and ideas of other writers such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and William Shakespeare are alluded to. Shakespeare's Hamlet provides a thematic focus for Disch's novel. In the play, Hamlet speculates on suicide and death: "To die, to sleep;/To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come . . ." (Hamlet, III, i). In The Businessman death and dreams are united into a perception of spiritual reality. Dreams are often visions of real events, some wonderful and some terrifying. Spirits and the living often interact in dreams, and death has some of the qualities of dreams, such as distortions of the physical world and the dreamers' ability to move invisibly from one place...