The most obvious literary precedent for "Je ne parle pas francais" is Dostoyevsky's Letters from the Underworld (1864). In both works a self-absorbed man reveals his own nature, and both works end with stories from the narrator's past. When Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry, read the manuscript of the first part of the story, he wrote her, "It's utterly unlike any sensation I have ever yet had from any writing of yours, or any writing at all except Dostoyevsky's."

Another possible influence on this story might have been impressionist painters like Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Cezanne, Manet, and Matisse. Critic Rhoda B. Nathan has pointed out that the Paris Raoul Duquette inhabits is the Paris of Toulouse-Lautrec and that the technique of the story represents Mansfield's "attempt to do with language what the impressionists and post-impressionists were doing with brush and palette."