Literary scholars who attempt to categorize and analyze the formal concerns of earlier work, including In the Penny Arcade and The Barnum Museum, have also tended to accentuate fantastic and phantasmagoric elements, even as they call attention to Millhauser's realist or naturalist bent. The names of Kafka, Borges, Poe, Calvino, Andersen, Hawthorne, Garcia Marquez, and.

Nabokov are often cited as analogues by those who cast Millhauser as a metafictionist or a magical-realist. Angela Carter and John Barth might also be assigned to this list.

Like Carter and Barth, Millhauser seems to be appropriating and revamping overly familiar myths. As Mary Kinzie has noted in reference to "The Invention of Robert Herendeen," Millhauser has made a career of rehabilitating and parodying archetypal patterns, such as the figure of the doppelganger or alter ego that is prevalent in literature from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, from Poe's "William Wilson...